


no grave can hold my body down

by strongandlovestofic



Category: Polygon/McElroy Vlogs & Podcasts RPF
Genre: Ableism, Body Horror, In The Flesh AU, M/M, Zombies
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-11-01
Updated: 2019-06-30
Packaged: 2019-08-14 01:21:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 4
Words: 26,813
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16483373
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/strongandlovestofic/pseuds/strongandlovestofic
Summary: The most unbelievable thing about most zombie media is how nobody in them calls the zombies “zombies.” The entire cast of the Walking Dead somehow lives in a world without a zombie mythos. Maybe Jenna can resurrect FiendZone forthatphenomenon.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [fiveyearmission](https://archiveofourown.org/users/fiveyearmission/gifts).

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> a huge, HUGE thank you to fiveyearmission, who is incredible. seriously, she ensures that my writing is good. i don't know what i'd do without her. THANK YOU, FRIEND. and also a big ty to the chat, bc y'all are good.
> 
> for the sake of this fic, please imagine that at some point pat, adam, and ryan all lived together; that pat gill would ever pay for cable (ryan needs to watch espn obviously); and that the american government is currently capable of things that aren't destroying my will to live. also if you haven't seen _in the flesh_ , you should watch in the flesh. you don't need to watch it to enjoy this fic (i hope), but it's fantastic and one of my favorite tv series and you should just watch it, please.
> 
> also enjoy!! ♥♥♥

The death rate of New York pedestrians is the lowest it's been since 1910, apparently. You saw that statistic in January.

Statistics don’t mean shit when Brian gets hit, walking from the station to work.

When Brian’s dead.

==

You’re an all-star at repressing emotions you don’t want to deal with in the moment, so that’s what you do. You show up to work because the alternative is staying in bed at home. Because going into the office seems less depressing than staring at the wall.

Simone and Clayton didn’t come in, but Jenna did, and the two of you look at each other across the tops of your computers but don't say anything. Midway through the day Tara sends everybody home because you’re all fucking depressing, but you go to a bar instead and drink. Allegra meets you there, and you don't say anything about how you thought for a while, for a glimmer of a moment, that there was something between you and him. It sounds so fucking trite now.

She comes back to your place, and you curl around each other in your bed. You let yourself lose it, sob into her shoulder while she rubs your back, while she presses her face against the top of your head and cries.

==

You take time off. Make the trip to a small town just outside Baltimore.

There's a lot of music at Brian's funeral.

==

Cliches are shit, but life goes on. You don’t interview anyone for Brian’s position. It’s not technically just out of respect — it’s because Facebook lied about how much millennials cared about video and it’s a miracle any of you still have jobs — but it feels like a kind of loyalty. It feels like the desk across from you has been preserved how Brian left it. Most of his stuff went into boxes that Brian’s family came to collect, but the cutout of Scrundler is still popping up from behind his monitor —

 _The_ monitor. Dead people don’t own things.

It takes time but you stop staring at that stupid fucking cardboard face every ten minutes. You stop looking up, ready to share the joke you just thought of, just to hear him laugh. To see him smile at you, like you’re worthwhile.

You stop.

And it becomes... serviceable. It's not good. You're not there yet — you won't be there for a while. But you'll get there.

Eventually.

Fuck.

==

The most unbelievable thing about most zombie media is how nobody in them calls the zombies “zombies.” The entire cast of the Walking Dead somehow lives in a world without a zombie mythos. Maybe Jenna can resurrect FiendZone for _that_ phenomenon.

This is, absurdly, the first thing you think when you find out everything’s gone to hell.

There's a presidential alert on your phone, on Adam and Ryan's phones, telling you to stay inside, to fucking _barricade_ your doors and windows: _Further details to come._ Fucking — okay?

You all have your laptops so you can work from home, but you mostly spend the day sitting around the living room wondering what the hell's going on, theorizing on Slack with your coworkers. It's a citywide lockdown apparently, and when you turn on the news you get CNN live, but MSNBC (and even fucking Fox News, which Ryan flips to while reassuring everyone present he’s checking it _just to be sure_ ) is playing pre-recorded videos.

CNN’s reporting on a possible riot through Manhattan, but they aren’t clear on details. _Gawker would’ve known what the fuck was going on_ , Julia types into Slack, and you’re laughing under your breath when the TV goes to static and you lose your internet connection.

“Uh,” Adam says, followed by, “so my mobile doesn’t have service.”

You’re fishing your phone out of your pocket to check when you hear something — _something_ — through the open window overlooking the fire escape.

And that’s how you find out there are fucking zombies in New York, because when Ryan goes to check what’s making that weird-ass noise, he yells and slams the window shut, and the three of you crowd around the closed window to watch a fucking corpse try to clamber up the ladder below your apartment.

==

You can’t google this information, because you still don’t have fucking internet, your phone’s a glorified alarm clock now, but you figure at least 30,000 people die in New York a year. Obviously not all of them get buried in New York, there’s not enough room, but the city’s still teeming with corpses. The whole motherfucking world is full of corpses. This is how you spend your time now — debating death rates and cemetery populations. You feel like Jenna would know this information. You don’t have a fucking landline because you’re all useless millennials so you can’t call anyone. They’re probably all fine at home, too. Bored out of their minds. Yeah.

Yesterday morning a group of people in raid gear (soldiers, probably? Every ounce of you that was a military brat is ashamed you can’t identify the branch) knocked on every door in your complex, announced that you’re to remain in your residence until further instruction is provided, distributed a stack of leaflets, and asked judgmental questions about how much potable water and non-perishable food you had on hand. One of them recorded your answers on a clipboard — what, no electronics at all in the apocalypse? — and advised you that the water in your apartment was potable but that if it changed color, to cease drinking it immediately.

“So what color is the water going to change? Brown? Black? _Blood red_?” Adam asks during a lull in today’s _how many dead people are outside_ conversation, standing next to the sink and turning the faucet on and off like he’s expecting it to change as he watches.

“Blood red, definitely,” Ryan says from underneath one of the leaflets that he’s draped over his face as he sprawls on the couch. The cover of the leaflet says _MARTIAL LAW: WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW_ , and it’s so fucking Kids’ Guide to Dystopia that you’d only gotten halfway through the first page before throwing it onto the coffee table.

“We can go outside, can’t we? There’s the — what is it,” you lean forward in your chair and rummage through the stack of apocalypse brochures. You did read _some_ of them — there. You grab the trifold pamphlet loudly declaring _SUPPLIES & HYGIENE on its front_. “Anyone else bothered by the fact they apparently _had these on hand_ — okay, here, ‘scheduled and supervised outings are available on a case-by-case basis for specific needs not met in provided supplies.’”

“What provided supplies?” Ryan asks, leaflet sliding from his face.

“Zombie apocalypse Blue Apron,” Adam says. “Where’s capitalism now, fuckers.”

“There is no ethical zombie consumption under capitalism,” you mutter, and push yourself up out of your chair. “What if they’re actually eating the rich?”

Ryan says something that sounds like _please God_ , _kill the president_ and you move over to the window.

The three of you had watched that corpse try to climb up the ladder for what may have been hours. It hadn’t gotten tired of reaching. You hadn’t gotten tired of watching — you’d finally stopped because the cavalry had arrived, an HMMWV from Fort Hamilton loaded for bear, and the soldiers had put a bullet in the corpse’s head that’d painted the pavement with black blood and brain matter.

It hadn’t looked real. Like bad special effects.

A clean-up crew had come through hours later in repurposed dump trucks, and the little surprise that was able to pierce through your muted disbelief was about how efficient it was. Army. Or National Guard.

No one on your floor has a landline. You’d checked, to see if you could call your parents, or your sister. No dice. Everyone’s useless fucking millennials. Your family's fine anyway. You know they are. They are, just like Allegra and Simone and the rest of your friends and not Brian, because.

Because Brian's probably a zombie right fucking now.

“Okay, we're watching a movie,” Ryan announces, and puts _Shaun of the Dead_ on because, he explains, what's the point of living during a zombie apocalypse if you can't have a sense of humor about it. Adam shoves Ryan over on the couch so he can sit down. You stay standing by the window, looking out.

==

They turn the internet back on in week 4. Mobile networks are still down, and a shit ton of sites don't work (Ryan’s the first to notice Twitter is dead, long live Twitter, _good fucking riddance_ ), but you get to email your family and confirm that they're fine, not too many zombies and more than enough guns in Maine. Your sister thinks it's only the recently dead who've come back — she went with a scouting troop through Portland and surveyed the cemeteries. You wish you could actually talk to her, but even if you could teach her how Discord works it’s blocked. Skype, too. _This is why Mom’s always said you should have a landline_ , she tells you, and you shoot back: _She never explicitly provided “zombies” as a reason_.

You touch base with Allegra, who tries to email you a selfie but tells you it bounced back, and then describes it in detail because she is, as she says, excruciatingly bored. _I look choice, because there is literally nothing for me to do other than get dolled up and watch Seinfeld DVDs_.

Plante sends out a mass email saying everything’s fine in Texas, thanks for asking, and that he’s been checking in on the dearly departed McElroys — who he clarifies are neither dead nor zombies when Simone responds with _WHAT?_ in all caps and bolded.

You get an email from your ex that just says, _You alive?_ and you respond with a thumbs up emoji and an upside down smiley face.

The army does twice daily sweeps down your street. There are weekly resource drops, and you’re all getting sick of peanut butter sandwiches, but at least it’s something. You ask if everybody gets the same thing one afternoon, when you’re helping a soldier unload boxes from the back of a truck for your complex, and she grimaces at you.

“It’s high in protein and relatively shelf stable,” she says, and that’s not an answer, so you figure if things really go to shit you can wage a raid against the high-rises in Tribeca and get actual food.

When you open the box this time on your kitchen counter, you’ve got oranges.

“Good news: we’re not going to get scurvy.” You chuck one at Ryan’s head and he catches it, because he’s a sportsman.

“Did you ever think it'd be like this?” he asks as he picks pith out from underneath his nails.

You grab an orange and work your thumb under the peel. “I've frequently thought about the orange experience.”

He huffs a laugh. “You know what I mean. This — weirdly sanitized?”

“Catechism did not prepare me for the particulars of this apocalypse, no,” you reply, and Ryan gasps sharply and demands you tell him what, if anything, Revelations says about zombies.

==

It’s stupid how normal it is. How it becomes normal. None of you are sure how rent’s supposed to work, but you haven’t paid and you haven’t been evicted. You didn’t pay your utilities for the month either, and nothing got turned off, so you’re just not going to mention it. Apparently the trade-off for finally achieving socialism is martial law and a zombie apocalypse, which… probably means that the fucking GOP was right. End of the world right here. (Even if socialism is a side effect and not the driving force.)

You volunteer to help with resource distribution because you’re comfortable around stoic military types, and because you’re going stir crazy.

(The tipping point, at which you knew you had to do something else, _anything_ else, was when the three of you created as many of your coworkers in WWE as you had photos and let the computer duke it out in a Royal Rumble; it’s a fucking shame you can’t pit women against men, because you know Tara would’ve taken out Jon Bois.)

So now you roll out of bed at 6 every morning because there’s no fucking point to staying up late anymore and you have too much energy and also because hell is real, and you feed Charlie and eat a PB&J sandwich and grab your jacket emblazoned with CIVILIAN VOLUNTEER on the back in reflective yellow letters. You meet Pvt. Sayyid at 7 sharp and she escorts you, usually silently, to the convoy you’ll be helping with that day.

It’s almost offensively boring. In 50 years you’ll be telling your grandkids about the time you spent distributing single-ply toilet paper to apartment complexes during the great zombie uprising, and they’ll want you to go back to talking about how, without the ability to send images anymore, memes devolved back into chain email forwards.

You’re not the only volunteer in the unit you’re with — there’s Charlene, an older woman with a weathered face, and a younger kid named Avery with vibrant green hair who had their volunteer jacket covered in enamel pins by the second day of duty. The three of you aren’t friends per se, but you see each other more than you see anyone besides your roommates, so maybe this is what passes for friendship in the apocalypse. The same kind of beleaguered affinity you feel for people you befriend in the two hour wait before you get to ride Splash Mountain.

Charlene brings a bag of individually wrapped lemon bars the second week of duty (“I’ve got my own Goddamned chickens — those fuckers eat anything — so I don’t need to wait for these assholes to pass out eggs,” she tells you when she shoves a bar at you. “But the lemon juice is from the _before times_ , so if they taste like shit, keep it to yourself.”), and Avery keeps looking at you when they think you’re not paying attention, like they recognize you. Thank God they don’t say anything about it, they just complain about how they had to sign up because their parents were driving them nuts at home (“That’s what I get for coming home from college for the summer,” they mutter, and nobody points out what it would’ve been like if they’d been stranded at college when this bullshit started).

It’s almost offensively boring, until it isn’t.

You’re near the train yard, taking stock before you're escorted back to your homes after a long day of handing out pancake mix and apples. Avery's singing under their breath, something you vaguely recognize but can't place (Brian would've — maybe Simone would know what it is), and that's why you don't hear it. You don't hear the low groaning, the slow shuffle of feet, until Sgt. Grower barks out a command and you grab Avery by the back of their jacket, tug them after you like it's second nature, hauling ass away from a fucking zombie as it struggles its way into the street towards you.

“Fuck you doing,” Charlene demands, and that's when you realize nobody's fired. Nobody's splattered the zombie’s brains on the pavement. 

Lt. Jefferson has a cattle prod and Pvt. Sayyid has a long pole with a loop on the end, like what they use for stray dogs, and they're approaching the thing — a man, young, with matted hair that was maybe lighter once, wearing a torn vest. You feel your guts twist in on themselves, your heart pick up, because for a second. For a second you think he’s.

For a second his hair is the right length, even gnarled and sticking to his skull with dull black blood. His gait is familiar, his awkward grace exaggerated, like he’s playing it up for a camera. His face is recognizable, is a face you've looked at for countless hours, is a face you used to make smile.

For a second you want to move towards him instead of back.

“Why aren’t they shooting it?” Avery asks from behind you, their shoulder brushing against your arm. “Pat, why are they—”

And you don’t know, because you’re. Because you’re — processing, because the man isn’t a man, it’s an it. And it’s definitely not. It’s nobody you know. It’s too short. The hair’s wrong. Similar build but. It’s just a shuffling corpse that they’re trying to. That they’re trying to catch, and not shooting.

“We need a pick up at West 211th and Sherman,” Sgt. Grower radios in, and then tells you it's time to go home.

You go home.

Adam greets you, tells you Ryan's made friends with some people down the hall, the zombie apocalypse really bringing people together.

You make a beeline for your bedroom, dropping your vest on the chair and pulling off your shoes before flopping onto your bed, unsettling Charles who meows at you in annoyance. You pull him onto your chest, sliding your fingers through his short fur, and you — fuck. You try to think.

You think about the cattle prod and the pole. You think about Sgt. Grower calling in a pick up. You don’t think about — about that moment, when you thought. When you.

If they're being rounded up now instead of shot, what does that mean? Are they being held somewhere? Are they being experimented on? How _Island of Dr Moreau_ is this?

Charlie wrestles out of your grip, yelling at you all the while, before settling on your pillow around your head. He’s purring loud enough to wake the — ha. You roll onto your stomach and smother your face, until your breathing slows down.

And then between one moment and the next you're sitting at your desk at work. Simone's next to you, and you can see Jenna and Brian across from you. Brian. Brian's stupid fluffy hair.

You stumble up out of your chair (Simone asks you if you're okay) and you stare at Brian over your monitors, and his jaw's missing. His skin is pale and where the bottom half of his jaw should be there's just — sinew. His tongue's lolling down the front of his neck like one of those fucking Colombian necktie victims, and he blinks at you with milky white eyes and tilts his head to the side, and makes a low guttural noise like he's trying to talk but can't enunciate.

Nobody thinks there's anything wrong. Simone's asking you _no, for real, are you okay?_ but no one says anything about Brian. About Brian sitting there. Decomposing. Decomposed. Dead but — not.

His hair's washed and styled and he's not — he's not wearing what he was buried in (that outfit is seared in your brain, grey dress pants and a white shirt and a matching vest with an orange pocket square and his fucking Celeste cartridge because he'd left it in the streaming room's Switch and you'd carried it on you for the previous week and slid it into his vest pocket when you'd looked down at his unnaturally calm face).

No, he's wearing a grey sweater and he's not wearing his glasses, nobody needs glasses when they're dead. The top of his mouth (he doesn't have a bottom lip, it's gone, it's missing) curves up on either side in the worst fucking smile you've ever seen and he moans out something garbled that makes both Jenna and Simone laugh.

You can't say anything. You open your mouth and nothing comes out, and you back up until you're bumping into the next row of computers, but no one's there to give you a hard time, Jeff and Ashley and Clayton and Allegra are gone, it's just you and — Simone and Jenna are gone too, it's just you and Brian. Brian, who stands up and moves towards you, his right foot hitting the carpet and his left foot dragging forward. He was hit from the left, everything from the waist down on his left side must be shattered but he's shambling anyway, like he doesn't feel pain. He doesn't feel pain. His tongue writhes against his neck like a tentacle and he reaches for you with his left hand, fingers missing, he has his thumb and pointer and the rest are gone at the second knuckle, and his two ice cold fingertips graze over your chin and you—

You wake up on your side, facing the wall, the blanket of dread smothering you so convincing that you stay stock still for God knows how long, hands clenching in front of you. You can't move. If you roll over, he'll be there. He'll be staring down at you, eyes milky white and jaw missing, and he'll smile at you and you'll want to puke.

Charles chirps from somewhere on the floor and you turn your face into your pillow, and you open your mouth and you don't — you want to scream, the urge is there, but you don't. You get a mouthful of polycotton. Your bed dips when Charles jumps up next to you, and you find his head after searching for a moment, and you pet him until he's flopped against you, purring.

You don't look behind you.

You finally fall back to sleep.

==

Eventually people return to work.

Eventually you can access parts of the internet that were blocked off, but you still can’t get anything international. (“TOR’s not functional, but it’s only a matter of time before somebody figures out the VPN situation,” you overhear Samit telling Jeff.) You discover pockets of online you can’t access anymore — Twitter is, thankfully, still down, providing the first solid proof you’ve seen that God does exist.

Though really, the whole zombie apocalypse thing is a mark against that possibility.

You go out with the Polygon Show crew with the intent to get rip-roaring drunk — “We survived!” Simone cheers, and slings her arms around Ashley and Chelsea — and on the walk to the bar you pass three separate armed patrols, which puts a slight damper on the festivities.

It feels surreal. How normal it seems. How jarring the differences are when you discover them.

There's a death count. No one's reported it. You're ashamed it didn't occur to you, your experience with zombies so clinical in the end — but people have died. Before they started rounding them up, the zombies killed people, and no one's officially talking about it. You only know because fuck everything official: independent journalists have started digging into the poorer neighborhoods in the city, where the Guard wasn't immediately deployed. Reporters in rural communities have begun forcing their way into the public eye, making it known that where there weren’t armed soldiers, there were citizens with guns, and a fuck ton of death.

That the government can round up the zombies all they want — but the reason a third of the country’s still alive is because of the stockpiles of fucking preppers. The think pieces are pointed. And exhausting.

“Where do you think they took them?” you ask your dad one night while you’re talking on the phone. While you both get progressively angrier about the news reports starting to come out, CNN and Fox and MSNBC finally unable to ignore the agitation. While you feel progressively more helpless, and while your dad — God bless him — gets progressively more Baby Boomer about how _everything will be okay, America’s survived worse_.

“Prisons,” he responds immediately, and you know he’s spent time thinking about this. “I’m guessing they’ve been rounded up and whatever the hell’s being done with them, it’s happening in prisons.”

“This isn’t. They wouldn’t, uh, why would they do that?” You don’t know why you’re protesting, as if there’s anything left the government isn’t capable of. 

“It’s only a matter of time,” he says solemnly.

You remember his certainty three weeks later. The days between are an endless deluge of news reports that don’t actually report anything of substance, just talking heads arguing over the appropriateness of militias and the importance of the Second Amendment, and your work becoming less about whatever games may or may not be coming out and more about the emotional catharsis of playing Call of Duty’s zombie mode. 

And then somebody, somewhere, leaks an internal document from the CDC.

Your dad was right. Prisons. Prisons and mental health institutions, and a drug out of the UK that has shown success in human trials — _Democrats are aligning themselves with globalists, UN “scientists” to fund zombie trials!_ Tucker Carlson shouts incredulously, ready and eager to latch on to the next big fear in the news compilation you see on YouTube — and you check out.

The rest of Vox is doing coverage, and WaPo breaks a story on one of the “centers” where they’re “rehabilitating victims of Partially Deceased Syndrome” and there are _pictures_ and you just fucking. Check out.

You show up at work and make a video with Simone and Clayton about the resurgence of the zombie genre in indies.

You go home and eat shitty food that’s not peanut butter sandwiches and play Hollow Knight, and think about how you should’ve used the time off work to actually fucking beat it.

You text Avery every once in a while, mostly pictures of Charlie, since they asked after him once. (They definitely knew who you were. You... you don’t think you’re that person anymore.)

You talk to your sister and your parents, learn how things are shaking out in Maine, about how they’re paying people now to turn in any zombies they find. They pay more if you don’t shoot them, if they’re “intact”.

You dream about the smell of decay and a half-smile. About hair matted with blood and brain.

HR sends out a blanket email on a Friday afternoon — Simone muses before clicking on it that maybe you’re all being laid off.

You don’t read as fast as some people in the office so you hear Jenna whisper _what the fuck_ under her breath while you’re still on the _At Vox Media We Value Diversity_ intro. You see Clayton rub his hand over his face and lean back in his chair. You watch Simone cover her mouth with her hands and stare at her screen with wide eyes.

 _At Vox Media we value diversity_ , HR tells you. _As part of a broader government-funded rehabilitation program Vox Media will be welcoming any former employees with Partially Deceased Syndrome back into their previously-held roles in order to engender unity and lead the way towards a brighter..._

You press your palms against your eyes and. And think. You think.

As far as you know, only one person died at Vox Media before everything went to shit.

You think about the stillness of Brian’s chest when you’d slipped the cartridge into his pocket. How cold he’d felt under your fingers. How perfectly put-together he had looked, sewed up and covered in foundation. How peaceful. How dead he’d looked. How fucking dead.

Not anymore though. Apparently.

Because Brian’s coming back to work on Monday.

Because Brian isn’t dead.

He’s just a fucking zombie.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you for reading!! chapter two's almost done, but i wanted to get this up on halloween so -- happy halloween!! :D
> 
> if you liked it, i live off of comments and kudos. i'd love to hear from you. ♥


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> it liiiiiiiiiives. hello party people. as always, a remarkably huge thank you to fiveyearmission, who really knocks everything i write into shape. thanks, doll. ♥
> 
> note: please read the updated tags, please and thank you. if you have any questions, hit me up in a comment or on disco.

Wake up. Dark. Claustrophobic.

Hungry.

Muffled sounds. Someone else. Above. Get out. Get out get out get out _hungry._

Out. Someone else. Elses. Elses and elses and others, others who fall, others you bring down.

Break open. Eat.

Less hungry.

Still hungry.

 

==

 

Wake up. Too bright, it hurts your eyes. You try to sit up, struggle, but something's keeping you down, lying prone.

You're hungry. Laura told you once that people sometimes mistook thirst for hunger, but you don't remember the last time you were thirsty. You’ve been hungry for a long time.

You open your mouth and you — you croak, a low, gasping sound. You don’t remember how to move your tongue, what shape it needs to be in, how it should curve. You swallow, your mouth dry, and you try again, and then a third time:

“Hello?”

Your voice reverberates — not in the room. In your head. Your skull. Skulls break easily if you want them to, and you do. Did. Why? You're hungry but it's not what it was. You remember what it was.

“H-hello? Hey, I'm — I'm awake?”

You're in a bed. You're tied down in a bed, like a flight risk. A prisoner. You're wearing — scrubs, or a jumpsuit. It's pale green, and clean. There's a matching green curtain around the bed, and you hear people around you, muffled. Through the curtain. The ceiling extends far past the top of the curtain on either side. You're about to yell again when the curtain opens and a man in blue scrubs steps through. You get a brief glimpse of the room behind him — big, bright, more seafoam green curtains — before he comes towards you with a tiny flashlight and starts checking your eyes, fuck, you can't stop him. He holds your eyelids open. He's blurry, you don't — you don't have your glasses.

“Name and date of birth?” he asks, and you blink through the spots of light swimming in your vision and try to figure out. Figure out why he's asking.

“What's — why?”

“Name and date of birth, kid,” he says, and he looks almost sympathetic, his features softening.

“Brian. Brian… Brian Gilbert, January 29th, 1994.”

He hums and makes a note on the chart he picked up from the side of the bed.

“You died on October 30th, 2018,” he says, and you hear the words but you have a hard time... They don't make sense. “You rose on January 20th, 2019, and you have been unmedicated for the last 18 months. Do you understand?”

“No, I'm, what?”

“It's okay, kid.” The nurse hangs the chart on the side of the bed. “You'll get it.”

 

==

 

You're released from the bed later by two guards wearing _big fucking guns_ — what the fuck kind of hospital is this — and an old woman in scrubs who looks disappointed in you. She beckons you to follow her, and you're escorted out of the big room full of drawn curtains and down an empty hallway.

You keep tripping over your own feet. When you look down you see — even with no glasses you can see your left foot is crooked, like you stepped on it wrong and it got stuck in that position. It's rotated in, and when you stop to try and, to try and straighten it, reach down and grab your foot, one of the guards pushes you forward. You trip but don't fall, and you don't stop again.

Your foot is wrong. It's hard to walk.

You — died, apparently. On October 30th.

You sit down in a chair in a room with the nurse, and she tells the guards to get lost. She sits down across a table from you, and her manner goes from tired and business-like to tired and concerned. Thoughtful.

“I'm guessing you have some questions.”

You're not sure where to start. You're hungry. Your foot's fucking… “That nurse, he said. He said I died.”

She smiles grimly, and opens the folder on the table between you. “We don't share details. Traumatic, apparently.”

“Is this…?” You feel stupid thinking it. But if you died. If you died, then.

“This isn't heaven anymore than it was before. You're alive. You're in a non-disclosed location in the southern United States.”

You look down at your hands. They're — they're familiar, but they're. They're discolored. They're mottled, like they got really cold. You flex your fingers and they feel stiff, like the joints are swollen. “If I died, then.”

“Your clinical diagnosis is Partially Deceased Syndrome. You're being medicated for it, which is why we're talking to each other right now and you're not trying to crack my skull open.”

Your stomach lurches. You're — hungry.

“You're due for your injection, which is why you're looking at me a little peckish. All the higher-ups say there's a several hour window after missed meds before you get bitey, but. I've seen the way your eyes track us.”

All of the words she's saying make sense individually, but together all you're getting is static. Because it doesn't. Because you can't be dead and alive. You can't — remember an impact, the impact, the car slamming on its breaks; and then remember an after, remember dirt and dark and hunger and satiation but not for long enough.

“I'm, I'm sorry, I'm not. I don't understand, you're.”

“You died, Brian.” Her expression softens briefly before she reaches for the white box at the end of the table and places it in front of you. There's a logo on the box, and under the H&W it says _neurotryptaline_. “And you rose with all those other poor souls and wreaked absolute havoc on the world, and now you’re gonna pay us back for the harm you did.”

 

==

 

You're told that your insurance plan covers neurotryptaline, which is a drug they put in a fucking massive syringe and then inject into a hole at the base of your neck. (It stops the hunger. You feel — not satiated on it, but not hungry. You remember being hungry. You remember...) There's a copay, which will accrue until you're able to re-enter the workforce. Some companies are taking employees back, but if you can't find work there's an employment assistance plan.

They cover all of this before they answer your questions about your family. About your friends. About what the fuck happened while you were — while you were a zombie for two fucking years.

“I just want, can you tell me—”

“Surviving next of kin was notified as soon as you became cognizant,” says your social worker, Steven, who you've never seen look not-tired. He's digging around in his desk drawer and he whistles when he reaches for something, then sets a glasses case on the desk. “They have two months to make arrangements, and if they do not wish to collect you then you will be taken to a—”

“I know,” you interrupt, because you've seen it happen. There was a woman, dark skin grey and eyes milky white. She was dragged out of the rec room they keep you in for most of the day. You tried to ask the nurses on duty what was going on, and finally another patient (that's what they call you, but really, you're all inmates) told you the woman was unclaimed. She was being moved to labor.

“Brian, I'm here to help you,” Steven says calmly, but he's not looking at you, he's looking at your folder. His hand is hovering just under his desk. He does that a lot. You know there's a button there, in case you get “unmanageable”. The guards don't shoot to kill, but you've seen people get tasered. You've also seen a few people shot in the leg, in the chest, non-lethal but permanent, people who'd “refused to take their medication”. You don't know how someone in a fucking high-security prison/hospital manages to not take their medication. You think it's a convenient excuse.

“Can you at least tell me who you notified?”

Steven smiles blandly and pushes the glasses case towards you, and lets you know your time is up for today.

You put the glasses on when you're back in the hallway. It's nowhere near your prescription, too weak, but it's better than the blurriness. You think. You wonder what their fucking copay is.

 

==

 

You’re moved out of the big bright curtain room into a smaller, darker one, which you share with an older man named Carlos. He tells you one night when you're supposed to be asleep that he's not going to be claimed —not because he doesn't have family, not because they don't love him, but because he's undocumented. They’re undocumented. He laughs under his breath when you protest, even though you have no idea what to suggest, you just. That's just. It's just wrong.

“Yeah. Yeah, it's wrong,” he says, and one of the guards tells you to shut up and go to sleep. Lights out. Stop talking.

You don't sleep. You think Carlos does. He's already accepted he's fucked.

 

==

 

There are no mirrors.

You don't know what your face looks like anymore, but if you look like… if you look like everyone else in your unit, then. Then nobody on the internet's gonna call you cute anymore.

(You think this, _guess nobody on the internet's gonna call me cute anymore_ , and you sit down in the middle of the rec room and your body starts shaking and you cover your mouth with your hands and you don't. You don't cry. You can't cry. There's nothing for your body to cry, just a black sludge inside you that you vomited up when one of the other patients told you drinking water was fine. It wasn't fine.

You have to calm down because the nurses get nervous, and one of the guards slowly moves his finger to the trigger of his rifle.)

When Carlos is meeting with his social worker, you strip out of your jumpsuit and try to look at yourself. Your arms look… they don't look normal, the color's wrong, splotchy and bluish, but they look whole. They weren't damaged when you.

Your hands feel stiff when you move them, but they're fine. You think you could still play piano. You're not sure about guitar. You have the calluses you… that you had when. Your fingers are still callused, anyway, but you have no idea what would happen if you tore them.

Your chest is even more mottled, and you've. Well, you've still got your dick. For all that it may as well be a vestigial organ now. (They'd had pamphlets, like you were taking sex ed again — fucking _your body and you_. You don't want to know what they did to the people before you to find out arousal was just not in the cards.)

Your left hip is the color of a deep bruise, black and purple. You don't remember the impact, but it must've hit you on the left. Your left leg is.

Your right leg is fine. For whatever definition of “fine” you're using now. It's attached to a zombie but it's legging it up just great.

Your left leg is.

You can be clinical about it. Pretend it's someone else's leg. Pretend it's just something you're looking at, pretend. Pretend it's stage makeup. Special effects.

Your left leg has been sewn back together. Just below the hip, like maybe it was busted out of the socket. Like it was torn off.

There's stitching across your thigh and below, arcing over your grey skin, neat inch-long stitches made by a hand that didn't expect anyone to judge them for their cosmetic value. You were probably buried in a suit so nobody was expected to see them. (You remember the suit. The sleeves were constricting. The vest was dark and it looked pretty when your shirt went bright red and it stayed dark. You remember. Contrasting.)

You trail your fingers over the stitches. You don't — feel them, not like you did before. The sensation is muted, both your fingertips and your thigh, like you're touching yourself through a layer of fleece.

Your nail snags on one of the stitches and it tugs. Your skin bunches up, moving with the thick thread, and you start to smooth it back out before. Before stopping.

You bet you could feel your femur, if you wanted to. Just push through, nothing but an inch or two of haltingly rotted meat stopping you. Nothing but an uncertainty of whether they'd sew you back together. Depending on whether you were special enough — insured enough, rich enough, white enough.

(You remember pushing your fingers into skin, you remember how easy it was to bite through.)

Your right foot is fine. Your left foot was reattached… wrong. It's curved in, like you've permanently rolled it. It makes walking hard. The mortician who put you back together didn't expect you to need to walk again. They didn't expect you to trip over your own foot. They didn't know you loved to dance.

You slump back onto your bed, your left knee cracking a little when you do, and you laugh. Wetly. Like your body remembers what crying was like. Your chest hurts. You don't feel pain, not like you remember, you could probably rip your fucking leg off and it'd just be an inconvenience, but your chest hurts.

You hurt.

For the first time since puberty stopped tormenting you, you don't know what to do with your body. You don't know how it works, you don't know how to move it, you don't recognize it.

You might.

You might hate it.

 

==

 

You find out that Vox Media is part of the Reengagement Program for victims of Partially Deceased Syndrome before you find out about your family. That's Goddamn capitalism for you: you've got a job that'll help you pay back your rehabilitation costs but you don't know if everyone you care about is okay. You don't know if they still care about you.

(Your mom used to read you _Love You Forever,_ but that was. “As long as I'm living.”)

You're given a start date, one month out. Like that's — reasonable. Like you're gonna be ready to step outside and get back to making wacky jokes on the internet, like that's. Like that's fine.

Your social worker gives you a cosmetics bag full of foundation and sponges. “Participants in the Reengagement Program are provided with assimilation assistance to help pave the way back to being a contributing member of society. If you need help with the application—”

“I was a theatre kid,” you interrupt him. There's a blister pack near the bottom of the bag, and you flip it over to see brown-colored, non-prescription contacts. Your eyes are hazel. Were hazel. They're… they’re probably white now, a sickly greyish white with a pinprick black pupil on the center, and with these, they’re gonna be brown.

Steven smiles thinly and folds his hands on the desk between you. “You’ll be expected to present yourself appropriately while in public. What you do in the privacy of your own home is up to the laws in place in your state of residence — New York, I believe?”

You nod, because of course you’ll go to New York, that’s where work is, it’s maybe where Laura and Jonah still are, it’s where your friends are, but it’s not where your mom is. You don’t know if — “Can you just, can you look through a database or something? Tell me if my family’s at least… alive?”

You don’t hate Steven. His job seems shitty, and he’s probably just trying to get through his day and home to his kids, maybe, out of this fucking prison and away from the weird shambling zombies who keep trying to have opinions and express their _feelings_ when half a year ago they were bashing people’s heads in, but you hate. You hate what he represents. You hate the fucking bag of cosmetics — _assimilation assistance —_ sitting in your lap.

“Sorry, Brian. Privacy laws prohibit us from revealing —”

“Okay,” you say. You don’t need to hear it. That it’s such an _opportunity_ to be able to pay the country back for your rehabilitation. That privacy laws apply to citizens, and you don't have the rights needed to push back against that. Because you're not a citizen anymore. “Okay, just. Just keep me updated. Please.”

He excuses you.

 

==

 

The makeup kit contains a compact mirror. It fits in the palm of your hand, and you have to fiddle with the closure until you can pop it open — you don’t want to use your nails, they’re cut down to the quick as it is.

(You… you don’t remember. You don’t remember hunger, or unfamiliar strength, or ragged nails digging through wood and dirt and fabric and skin. You don’t.)

You get the mirror open and hold it in front of your face and. You close it again. You carefully put it down on the mattress and drag your hands across your face, unsettling your shitty glasses, and you lean forward and, and you breathe in shakily (Steven had said you didn't need to breathe but that your brain still thought you had to) and you shove your head between your knees and.

And think about your eyes. The discoloration pooled near your hairline on the left side of your face, where your head must have hit…

You sit up and grab the compact. This is — it's stupid, you're not somebody who runs from his problems and even if your problem is, is the fact that you look like a fucking nightmare then that's just what's going on, that’s just _how it is_ , and. You look at your face.

In junior year of high school you had to take health class, and in between all of the _don’t have sex because you’ll get gonorrhea and then you’ll die_ stuff they talked about drunk driving and showed you gross-out pictures of people who’d been in car accidents. You remember thinking how fake it had all looked, how you’d grown so used to what injuries and death looked like in movies that actual injuries and death looked wrong somehow. Actual injuries, death — hooking your fingers into either side of a mouth and stretching until you heard a _crack_ —

It looks like you’re wearing stage makeup. You played a zombie in a short film you helped with in college, and you look maybe a little more _real_ than you did then but not by much. Like if you rubbed at your cheek hard enough, chalky white would come off on your fingers.

Your face doesn’t appear to have been… damaged, aside from the bruise. You carefully brush your hair back, trying to see the extent of it, but it’s too dark in your room to see it clearly, and anyway, it. Goes back pretty far. You work your fingertips across your skull and feel a long row of simple stitches, tighter together than what you’d seen on your leg. More evenly spaced.

You set the compact on the mattress and fish out the contacts from the bag. Getting the packaging open sucks, getting one delicately positioned on your fingertip sucks more, and getting it into your eye sucks the most. But at least you have muscle memory of how this goes to combat your clumsiness, and the second pops in with less poking yourself. (At least poking yourself doesn’t hurt.)

When you’ve got them both in you grab the compact and — it’s worse now, it looks even more like stage makeup, your eyes almost normal (too dark) against your sickly white skin. You drop the compact — it skitters across the ground and you curse under your breath, but you let it stay there for now. You take the industrial-sized tub of foundation and one of the sponges out of the bag first, pry the jar open and push the sponge into the firm surface of the makeup.

The sponge comes up almost brown in the low light of your room but it’s better than gray, better than purple, so you wipe it over your face, start at the left side, by your hairline. Cover the — the worst part.

The worst part of your face, anyway.

Two years ago somebody stood over your body and carefully put your skull back together, stitched it up with a sure hand, maybe in case your mom ran her fingers through your hair, so she wouldn’t feel broken bone. So you’d look whole, before they put you in the ground.

And then you looked whole when you dragged yourself back out of it, and you felt _hunger_ , and you found other skulls and _those_ cracked easily enough, and fuck, it’d felt good, you don’t remember how it tasted but it was so _satisfying_ , you remember that, the slick slide of meat down your —

You find the compact, down on your knees on the concrete floor. You pry it open — it must’ve snapped shut when it fell, probably the only reason it didn’t break — and you look at yourself and you look. You look okay. Your skin’s more orange than you remember, but it just looks like you have a bad tan.

You can’t see the bruise, and your eyes are dark.

You look almost human.

 

==

 

Carlos is escorted away during the early morning, and he tells you not to be stupid when he sees your hands clenching, your body poised to fight. This is — it's wrong, it's so wrong.

“Es lo que hay,” he tells you, and you don't see him again.

That same day you're led out of your cell by a guard with a gun, and as she orders you through a door leading to a room with a dozen tables and chairs, you realize that your family must have claimed you, if you’ve already been placed in the Reengagement Program. You realize this at the same time that you see your mom sitting at one of the tables.

You can't cry, but your body goes through the motions anyway, you feel your face screw up and your chest go tight and your mom stumbles toward you and pulls you against her, and you can't —

You can't feel it. Some part of you knows she should be warm, that she should be soft, but you feel...pressure, mostly.

It's still the nicest fucking thing that's happened to you in months.

You don't remember what you talk about. It's nothing impactful, nothing about what you've been doing, what it's been like.

Your mom keeps crying softly in the middle of the conversation, wiping her cheeks and looking at you like you might disappear. You're glad — you're really fucking glad you've been using the makeup and contacts since they first gave them to you, so your first time seeing her wasn't. So she didn't look at you and know, see…

“Are you okay?” she asks you, and your complete inability to know how to answer that question must show on your face, because she reaches across the table and takes your hands in hers, your cold, dead hands. She doesn't seem to mind. She's looking at you like you're the best thing she's ever seen. “You're getting out soon, you'll be going to New York, back to Laura and Jonah, they still have the apartment.”

“How'd they afford that?” you ask, because sure, that's the most important question, New York real estate, but she sniffles and smiles and squeezes your hands.

“The economy went a bit squiffy for a while,” she says, which is the nicest way to describe Zombies Fucked Everything Right Up you've ever heard. “They're both so excited to see you. When I got the call, they, the nurses said I couldn't bring anyone else, and you know your brother, he's already diving into the initiatives currently on the table regarding victims of PDS…”

The guard in the corner of the room announces that visiting time is over. It can't — she just got here, you've only talked to her for a minute.

She squeezes your hands. “It's okay, sweetheart. You'll be out of here soon enough, and I'm going to drive you batty with how much you'll see me.”

You don't think that's possible. You tell her that and her eyes well up with tears and she pulls you from your seat and hugs you again, like she's trying to imbue you with warmth.

You barely feel it.

 

==

 

You've lost track of time. Every day is the same: meetings with your social worker, hours spent in a sad rec room with twenty other zombies avoiding each other's gazes. At one point you’d grabbed one of the board games from the shelf along the far wall but half of the checkers were missing and no one had wanted to play anyway, not that you’d found it in you to ask. You determined it, from context clues.

One of the others refuses to put on the makeup. It’s disconcerting, being surrounded by people who look almost normal and someone who objectively doesn’t. Whose skin is white and mottled purple, reminding you uncomfortably of what you look like under the foundation you reapply every morning. (Not that you look anymore — you’ve gotten good at making yourself up without pulling out the compact, only using it for a quick check, to make sure you’re decent.)

And you know the problem with thinking like this is that none of this is _normal_. Your big mistake is treating it like it’s normal, no matter what Steven insists you should do. Steven’s not a therapist. You’re starting to think Steven’s probably not — that he’s probably not even a fucking case worker. He sure as hell doesn’t seem to care about you beyond making sure you don’t bite his face off.

None of it’s normal, and it’s stupid to think of the one person who _isn’t_ coating their face in thick grease paint as the weirdo. Even if the thought of, of not wearing it makes you feel. Makes you feel like maybe you’d be less...

You try it.

You try it one morning. Why not? You wake up (Steven tried to explain why your body still needed sleep, but it was clear he was pulling it out of his ass and you stopped listening) and don’t look at the sink at the rear of your cell. You don’t pull out the compact mirror or the jar of foundation. You don’t pat yourself all over with setting powder that billows around you.

You don't put your contacts in. You don't look at your face at all, don't see your grey, ugly skin covered by broad swathes of foundation that's not the right color, just a little off.

No one says anything. No one looks at you all that much anyway. Steven mentions public decency laws when you shuffle into his office and you bite back the _fuck you_. There are no public decency laws in the facility. They can control when you get up and when you go to bed and what you do with your time (nothing, you do nothing, you’re all just sitting in here until they can cart you off to the fucking labor camps or until they have to turn you out onto the streets) but right now they can’t do anything about what you look like. So Steven clicks his tongue in disappointment but you haven’t had to see yourself, there are no mirrors, so who the fuck cares?

The nurse who dispenses your neurotryptaline...

Her hands shake when she pulls the back of your jumpsuit down. Her hands shake on the massive needle as she notches it in the hole at the base of your neck. Her hands shake when she places it back on the tray, making the tray rattle momentarily.

You thank her and she doesn't meet your eyes, just nods and walks away, quickly.

The next morning, you put the fucking makeup on.

 

==

 

When you’re released they give you an envelope that contains a letter, two train tickets, a five dollar bill, and a laminated ID.

The ID lists your name, date of birth, date of death, and the words **PARTIALLY DECEASED** emblazoned across the top in red. The ID photo is — is without your makeup. You, without your makeup.

You have to show it to the ticket taker at the train station. She smiles at you when you approach the turnstile and when she takes your ticket and ID, and you watch the smile fracture at the edges when she reads it. She averts her gaze when she hands your ticket and ID back, holding them both by the very end. For a split second you consider grabbing them close to her hand, so she’d have to touch you — and you push that, fuck, that vicious thought down deep inside of yourself.

You stand on the platform. You get on the train. You find your seat. You don’t meet the eyes of the old man sitting next to you, who keeps coughing into his hand. But you're close enough to see the intricate series of veins and capillaries underneath his wrinkled, paper-thin skin. To see the liver spots speckling his forehead.

You apologize when you push past him and head for the restroom between the cars. You lock the door behind you and stare at yourself in the mirror, at your too-dark eyes and your uniformly colored skin, and you think about how you're never going to age.

The conductor announces your transfer. You return to your seat and grab the small bag they gave you to hold your cosmetics and your neurotryptaline, and you avoid looking at the old man. You get off the train. You wait on the platform. You get on the next train.

You step off the train at Penn Station.

The platform is relatively empty, but when you look up the escalators you see a blurry crush of people moving through the station. It’s loud. They’re loud. The hospital was quiet, except when someone was shot. Before, it was quiet until someone screamed —

You wrap your arms around your bag and hold it tight to your chest. You have to walk for a bit through the brisk-moving crowd, you have to walk to the subway, the F line, and when someone brushes against you, you stop, you freeze up like you’re waiting for them to realize, like you’re.

They don’t notice you. No one notices you, you don’t think anyone notices you, because you’re not noticing them. You focus on your feet, the slow drag of your left foot because it’s useless, and someone pushes past you and calls you a _fucking cripple_ under his breath and the hurt you feel is almost immediately replaced by a startling relief, that he didn’t think... that he didn’t realize you’re not.

That you’re just dead.

 

==

 

You had no way of telling Laura or Jonah that you were coming.

You can’t get into the apartment complex. You don’t have a key and the call box is still broken. Years later, it’s still broken. You jab your thumb against the call button (you think about what would happen if you pushed too hard, no pain to warn you, and then you’d be stuck with a broken thumb for the rest of your… existence). There’s something uncanny about this simple thing — this simple stupid fucking button — being exactly the same as you remember. As if no time has passed, and you just forgot your key.

It’s getting dark. You stand to the side of the building and wait for someone, anyone to show up, let you follow them in, people’s innate goodness conflicting directly with the building’s security policies. But no one shows, the only people on the street passing by without looking up, and you’re just standing in front of your building. Like you're a visitor. An unwelcome guest. Your mom said they still lived here but what if that changed in the month since you saw her, what if…

You miss breathing. You miss taking a deep breath to calm yourself. You miss closing your eyes and inhaling — you can still do it, go through the motions, but nothing changes, it doesn’t grant you any measure of peace. Your brain doesn’t respond like that anymore, it’s focusing all its efforts on ensuring you don’t launch yourself at the nearest warm body in search of —

You run your hand through your hair.

Then you brush your hair back into place in case — in case any of the skin you didn’t cover with your foundation is showing. It’s dark enough that someone probably wouldn’t be able to tell, but you don’t want Laura’s first sight of you to be grey, dead. You don’t want her to look at you and think —

The bodega on the street corner’s gone. You’d get sandwiches there sometimes, when you worked from home, and the man behind the counter didn’t know your name but he’d recognize you, he’d remember your order. You always told yourself you’d try something new and he’d already be making your ham and cheese by the time _gimme a_ was out of your mouth. It’s a coffee shop now, a tragedy of clean lines and pristine surfaces, and you hope the guy’s okay. That he just closed up shop, even that he just got pushed out by high rent. That he wasn’t a fucking casualty.

“Brian?”

It’s cinematic, how her face is illuminated by the street lamp, how she’s backlit by the setting sun. Her eyes are wide and her mouth is open. You watch her expression collapse in on itself right before she rushes at you, arms out, and she collides into you and you grunt with the force of it as she lets out a wet sob.

“ _Brian_ ,” Laura says again, her voice wobbly and thick, and you haven’t — you haven’t really been touched in a while. It feels strange, like she's a weighted blanket. You awkwardly move one of your arms — she's wrapped you in her hold so tightly — and rest your hand against her back, and when she pulls away her face is streaked with tears. “They didn't, they said you were coming but didn't say _when,_ that's, that's bureaucracy for you, huh? Oh, oh gosh, look at you.”

She touches your face and you watch her expression change, you feel the weight of her hand lift from your skin, you're so close to her she can't hide the way her mouth pulls taut and her eyes dilate. And then she smiles again, less eager than before, too much teeth, and you wonder how you feel to her. What you must feel like. If you're cold. If you feel cold to the touch, harder than you should be. If you feel like you did when you were dead in your Goddamn casket.

“C'mon up,” she says, and she keeps glancing at you while she opens the door, like she's scared you'll disappear. Like she's scared. “We never uh, really packed up your room, so it's pretty… I mean, Zuko really took it over, you're gonna have to deal with just, just so much cat hair, Brian, but…”

The complex doesn’t have an elevator. You remember joking about that when you first moved in — that the building was equipped with a manual stair climber, how convenient. Laura waits at the first landing, waits for you while you stare at the first step and think about your left leg buckling under you.

It takes you a full fucking minute to climb the first flight. It takes you — _it takes you_ — you’re gonna have to leave for work fifteen minutes early, apparently, because you live on the third floor and there’s no elevator in your building and there’s no elevator at the subway station and your fucking leg doesn’t work like a leg, and Laura’s smile is brittle and yours is too, and when you’re inside, when you’re home, _home_ , she asks you if you want anything to drink and you feel like —

“No, thanks,” you tell her, and she puts the glass she’d started filling on the kitchen table and walks towards you and grabs you up in a hug again.

“I’m, I’m so glad you’re here, Bri,” she whispers, and you’ve never doubted your family loves you, all the anxieties in the world used to crowd themselves inside your skull and you never doubted that. You never doubted that. You don’t doubt that.

She shifts her head on your shoulder, so her forehead isn’t touching your neck.

 

==

 

You're met by HR in the lobby. The woman introduces herself and you forget her name almost instantly, and she intones at you about what an opportunity it is for all of you that you're here.

You don't go to her office — the two of you sit in a meeting room with the door open, and every few minutes someone comes by to check in, ask her a question, like she's the world's most important HR employee. You… you don't want to think it's intentional. But she didn't shake your hand when she greeted you.

Your contract is on the table. You're glad suddenly that you had a spare set of your own glasses, that Laura and Jonah never cleared out your bedroom, so you can read it. You see your job title, which is the same, and your salary, which is... not, and as you stare at the numbers you realize you assumed — you assumed a lot.

“Your wages will be garnished until the cost of your rehabilitation is paid in full,” she says, like that explains the entirety of your pay cut. Apparently you’re not in the union anymore. She's tapping her fingers on the tabletop, her nails clicking softly, grating. "And I can tell from your expression you may have questions about the salary caps, so I have this,” she rummages in one of her folders, “right, this pamphlet from DHS about the program, and there’s a phone number.”

The pamphlet is glossy and filled with pictures of smiling faces, everyone’s skin color a little too flat for them to be anything but slathered in foundation, and she points to the phone number on the back under a cheery _Reach out!_ There are two websites listed too, the CDC and DHS. Apparently the zombie apocalypse is a two-agency problem.

“The last thing — right.” She smiles at you, all teeth. “Sorry, this is just as new for me as it is for you. The last thing is the insurance paperwork, which you'll need to review and sign.”

She passes you a stack of papers. It's all dense bullshit, all _The Undersigned Agrees to_ — and you start to skim through the jargon until. Until you realize what the point of it is. It’s not for insurance. You don't need insurance. You’re paying for the neurotryptaline but you're not gonna get the flu or end up in the ER, even if you were hit by — by another car. This is…

“DHS requires this, it's all bureaucracy,” she says breezily, as though she's not asking you to sign a waiver of Vox Media’s liability in the event you go on a rampage and slaughter your coworkers. As though the fucking government isn't telling you to agree you'll be a good zombie and take your drugs, and that if you don't, you understand you'll be carted off to the fucking gulag.

“Oh,” you say, and you pick up the pen from the table. It feels clumsy in your hand, too small in your stiff fingers. “Okay,” you say, because you don't know what other options you have. Because if you don't sign these papers, what then. If you don't accept the pay cut, if you don't accept the garnishment, if you don’t accept the complete lack of benefits — what then. “Thanks for explaining,” you say, and you sign the forms where you're supposed to, your handwriting sloppier than it used to be.

 

==

 

She escorts you to Polygon's floor and leads you past the front desk. She pushes the glass door open and laughter spills out, and you stop just outside. Your feet stop moving.

You can see heads bent over desks. The top of Clayton's headphones.

It's real, suddenly.

She walks in and you stay where you are. You don't follow her. You can’t move.

The thing is, you’d thought about your family. You thought about them constantly — you worried if they were okay or not, if they knew about you, if they would claim you. And yeah, you’d thought about how fucked you’d be if you had to go back to making videos, to being a body in front of a camera, but you hadn’t connected all the dots. You hadn’t thought about the people behind that door. Hadn’t thought about making Simone laugh, or staying late with Clayton laboring over raw footage. You hadn’t thought about _Pat_ —

The woman from HR pushes the door open and sticks her head out. Her smile doesn’t reach her eyes. Her hand’s tight on the door handle — you can tell through the glass. “Everything okay?”

“Yeah.” You try to smile, and she steps back, holding the door open. You step around her, keeping your distance so she doesn’t have to touch you.

Everyone's in the office. Everyone's there, and everyone's looking at you, and you’re uncomfortably aware of how much you’ve spent the last few — months? Has it been months? Trying to keep your head down. God, you’re wearing _makeup_ , trying to _literally blend in_. But now you’re standing here and everyone’s staring at you, and you're not used to it anymore, you're not — _comfortable_ with it, with being the center of attention, with all Goddamn eyes on you.

You look at your old desk. It's empty, like they never hired anyone to replace — to fill your position. Or maybe they just moved someone so you could have it back, but you look over the faces and only notice one you don't recognize, and she's sitting with the writers. (Everyone's staring at you, and every face, every single one looks startled, all of them.) And fucking — _Scrundler's_ there, perched behind your monitor, they never threw it out, and from there it's easy to look up at Pat like you used to, over both your computers, to catch his eye and make him laugh, to share whatever you came up with that might put a smile on his face —

He looks shocked too, like he's. Ha, like he's seen a ghost. Like maybe — they had to have known you were coming. They had to have known, right? That you were — not dead. Mostly dead. But Pat's looking at you like someone gutted him, like maybe even if he did know, this wasn't what he expected, _you_ aren't what he expected, and before you can do something, say something, Simone's right in front of you with tears in her eyes and a wobbly smile.

“Look at you, oh my God,” she says, and she laughs, her voice thick. “Tara's gonna be pissed.”

Something must show on your face because she flaps a hand at you. “No, just, she’s not here, she wanted to harass you, normal stuff." And then she's invading your space, wrapping her arms around you, pulling you into her, and you tense, ready for it, ready for her to —

“Holy shit, you're cold,” Simone tells you, and then she pulls back, eyes wide. “Oh, oh no, that's — was that insensitive? Fuck, sorry, am I not supposed to mention, uh, the whole—”

And it's so Simone, and it's so _honest_ , and you feel an uncomfortable urge to cry. “It's fine,” you tell her, and she looks unconvinced. “It's totally fine,” you say, because Laura was so careful with you, because HR was professional and bland and _fucking complicit_ in making you feel so much less than human, and Simone's absent-minded honesty is like a balm. Like a reassurance that despite what you are now, maybe there's a chance at normalcy.

“Okay,” she says, and she squeezes you tight again. Her cheek is pressed against yours. You want to feel it. You still don’t.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you so much for reading!! i'd love to hear from you in a comment if you're so inclined. ♥


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> fiveyearmission is a hero and she makes everything i write so much better than i ever could. ♥

There's tension running through the office when you get in.

Jenna whirls around at her desk every time anyone enters the office and then glares back at her screen when it's not HR, sucking her lips between her teeth.

Clayton leaves one of his ears of his headphones off.

Simone stands at her desk, shifting between her feet and breathing out slowly, repeatedly, like she's trying to maintain calm.

You try to forget, because you actually, God, you actually do have work to finish today. So you keep your head down, go over footage about _Death Stranding_ 's latest trailer (researchers claim that the people who will someday play _Death Stranding_ may already have been born), and ignore your coworkers.

You mostly pull it off.

(Your hand tenses on your mouse whenever Jenna turns. You can hear Simone through your headphones.)

Chelsea asks if anyone wants anything from Potbelly before heading out to grab lunch. That’s why you don’t notice at first — you think the door opening is just Chelsea coming back. You think it’s Chelsea until Simone knocks into your chair as she moves, and then you look up and meet Brian’s eyes.

All you’ve eaten today is coffee and a day-old cruller and you feel the weight of it, undigested, in your gut. Brian looks normal. Your palm’s sweaty against your mouse. The back of your neck is cold. He looks completely normal, like he just rolled out of bed late this morning. You didn’t expect him to look — normal.

You still have nightmares sometimes.

Nightmares where he looks up at you from his monitor and his eye sockets are gaping holes in his face, the quiet crunch of maggots the only sound in the office other than your labored breathing.

Nightmares where you’re sitting across from him in the lunchroom and when he drinks you can hear the iced tea hit the seat of the chair. His shirt slowly forms to his ribcage as it gets wet with each fucking swig he takes, and it’d be cartoonish if it didn’t sound so real, didn’t _look_ so real, like you could stretch out your hand and feel bone.

You’ve never had any nightmares where he looked perfectly fucking normal.

And then Simone's on him, and the office unfreezes, everyone clamoring to say hi, Petrana and Jenna crowding around him, and you sit at your desk and watch him smile. Watch his attention dart between each of your coworkers. Watch him laugh at something Jeff says. And it's subtle, but you also watch him sink back against Simone and then move slightly to stand just behind her shoulder, and that's — different. Different enough that you stay seated. Different enough that the feeling of _wrong_ you had starts to solidify in your gut like a stone.

His voice is barely audible over the voices around him, and his eyes are just a little too wide.

You're not searching for incongruences, you're not digging for reasons Brian isn't — _Brian_ , but it's different. He's not hamming it up, relishing the attention like he used to. He's… weathering it.

Russ slaps a hand on Brian's shoulder and everyone starts to disperse, leaving Simone to flap her hands towards their desks, smiling at Brian.

“They only had a loaner but we have a request in,” she says, gesturing to Brian's laptop, and his eyes slide over the set-up before — he glances at you, and then he looks away, back at his desk. Shit, what are you doing —

“Hey, man.” Your voice is quiet, croaking out of your throat like you swallowed steel wool, and you don't know what your face is doing but you hope you're smiling. “Welcome back.”

“I've had better vacations,” he replies, and for a second — so fucking brief — his face twists into a self-effacing grin, the joke not at all funny but damn good anyway. You want to build on it, want to turn that grin _real_ — and then his expression goes neutral again. Like he’s not sure how you received it. Like he doesn’t know you at all. Like he doesn’t remember how the two of you were.

Tara gets back from her meeting and whisks him away — she'd mentioned she wanted to get him right back in the thick of things, he was on his way to being their golden child after all, and then she'd added that anyone who thought otherwise could _fuck off._ You know what she means. The comments on his Skyrim video became a memorial to Brian after his death, and slowly over the last year they've evolved — all of you have taken time to weed out anyone speculating if he was a “fucking zombie”. Speculating that if he were a _fucking zombie_ , how many people “ _a soyboy like him could’ve_ …”

You're ready to go to the mat to keep the assholes out once people know he's back. (There were enough dickheads who couldn't cope with Brian's _nails._ )

He doesn't return to his desk after the meeting, instead slipping out the front door towards the elevators. Tara comes back and heads into her office, shutting her door, and you feel a deep unease settle in your bones. There’s no reason for it, he's probably with IT — they had to have deleted his account, and who knows how much time they had to get it reinstated. But it’s there, a worry that something went wrong, that with Brian out of your sights again you have no confirmation this is even real, that you’re part of some mass hallucination, even though you spent the weekend researching, talking to your dad.

You’d read up on the Reenagement Program as much as you could — it’s a lot of bullshit politician-speak, all “when we work together good things happen”. You’d found the actual legislation text, but it’s all dense legalese and your eyes had glazed over by the third subsection. Your dad only had much info as you did but he’d had strong opinions about it.

“Is he union?” he’d asked, like you’d know the answer - you hadn’t even known Brian was alive two days ago.

“He _was_ , I have no idea if he’s still — God, what the situation is with that. Citizenship seems like it’s fucked, let alone union membership.”

Your dad had _tsked_ at your language, but hadn’t disagreed.

Simone messages you on Slack and pulls you out of your concern spiral: _Happy hour to celebrate our boy right after work yes/yes_

You see Brian step back into the office and get waylaid by Matt and Allegra, and you exhale slowly. Roll your shoulders back. Type to her: _Fuck yeah_.

You look at Brian’s bland smile. He looks... polite. Like he did back when he was first hired: when he was worried about misstepping, about making you all think he was the wrong choice. Like he was worried you’d hate him.

The bar will be loud, it may be crowded — but you’ll sit next to him. You’ll have a chance to talk to him beyond trite greetings. Maybe you’ll even get the chance to make him laugh. It’s been, God, two fucking years since you heard him really laugh and the need to hear it aches deep in your bones. No Goddamn bland smiles allowed.

==

Brian’s in and out of the office for the rest of the day. You hear Jenna ask him if he’s had any time to sit, and he replies with, “Gotta love orientation. They showed me where the bathrooms were.”

You watch him as he moves through the office. It’s the novelty of it at first, seeing Brian at all, reminding yourself this is happening, this is real, somehow — but then you keep watching, because...he moves differently. He favors his right side. It’s more pronounced when he takes longer strides, when he’s walking across the full length of the room, and by the end of the day you can tell he’s adjusted, taking smaller steps to account for it.

Simone tells Brian about happy hour once they've got his desk set up properly, when he's repositioning his chair, his monitor.

“Tonight?” He stares down at his desk.

Simone shifts beside you, frowning. “Yeah, if you’re up for it. I’d understand if you just want to go home and chill though.”

He doesn’t respond immediately.

“I bet I owe you a beer,” you say, because you probably did, before. But you also want him to come, and paying $7 is more than worth that. You want to hang out with him again — _actually_ hang out, not just see him in passing. You want to feel alone with him in a crowded room, like you used to. Back when Allegra would make pointed comments about how you were attached at the hip, and Ashley would sass that you were the same model, just palette-swapped.

He looks up and locks eyes with you. You want that again. You haven't thought about missing it — you grieved, you, fuck, you _grieved_ , but part of that process was understanding you wouldn't have the opportunity to be with him. Not — fuck, not _be with him_ , but.

And now the future is Goddamn wide open because he's sitting across from you. Because he's nodding, giving you a half-smile that finally reaches his eyes, making warmth pool in the center of your chest. “Okay,” he tells you, and then he looks at Simone. “Sure. Let's party.”

==

You move in a group down the street, a nebulous mass with Brian at the center because he’s the man of the hour. (Because you have to cross multiple intersections. You can’t tell if anyone else is doing it intentionally. You are.) Allegra, Matt, and Ashley are spitballing ideas for their next recording, and Simone and Jenna are arguing about — you think they’re arguing about bread. You’ve worked your way to Brian’s side, and he's quiet so you're quiet. (God, he was never quiet before. You never would've described Brian as quiet.) This close, even moving more slowly as a group — everyone else has to have noticed he's slower, they're just not saying anything — his limp’s so fucking obvious. He doesn’t look like he’s in pain, you haven’t noticed him wincing, but...

There’s not a lot of information about the hospitals rehabilitating victims of PDS. You can’t imagine they’re great. Their locations are confidential, which ostensibly protects everyone involved, but also allows them to — God, one of them’s probably Guantanamo, for all you know. They could have done anything to Brian while he was there.

“What’s with the face? Aren’t we supposed to be having fun?” Brian’s arm brushes against yours, the back of his hand grazing your knuckles — and then he takes an obvious step away from you and looks across the street.

The touch was brief, cold, but you still feel a warmth radiate throughout your entire Goddamn body, and you stare at his profile. You don’t know what you expected when you saw him again. If you thought he’d be unrecognizable (he’s different but he’s not, he’s not). He’s... familiar. This is familiar. It’s not the same, but it has the potential to be.

You swallow around the dry thickness suddenly in your throat. You curl your fingers into a fist so you don’t try and take his hand.

“That’s my secret, Brian,” you tell him, dipping your voice low into a vague approximation of Mark Ruffalo, and he turns his face towards you enough that you see the beginnings of a smile, “I’m always having fun.”

“Liar!” Simone objects from your other side, apparently having resolved her bread debate with Jenna, who’s looped their arms together at the elbow. “Brian, Patrick is a mopey boy and nothing has changed.”

“We, all of us,” Jenna says, “have remained but pupae in the eyes of God.”

Brian huffs a laugh and ducks his head, his hair falling into his face. “I do _not_ recommend the chrysalis stage.”

Jenna laughs immediately, breathing out _oh my God_ in a rush, and it takes you a second to — fuck, chrysalis, _coffins_ , can you laugh at this? Is this something you’re allowed to laugh about? And then Brian’s looking at you out of the corner of his eye, the edge of his mouth turned up into a devious smile, and you throw your head back.

It’s better than familiar. It’s something you hadn’t allowed yourself to miss. It’s normal.

==

You luck out — the place is busy but not so crowded you can’t all file into the back, pull two tables together and order pitchers, wings, and fries. You get yourself a cider, and ask Brian if he wants one too, but he shrugs, demurs that beer’s fine. Chelsea dives into a story about Vegas that leads the conversation into everyone gushing about their cats.

While you listen to Ashley review the ways Crunchwrap has been ridiculous recently, Simone passes you a plate of wings, and after taking a few you give it to Brian. He passes it immediately to Clayton without taking any — he’s been keeping to fries. He asks, “Did you get a cat yet, Simone?” and that leads Simone to venting about landlords and pet rent.

Brian’s been avoiding ketchup too. He’s drunk half a beer and eaten less than a handful of dry fries, and you’re trying not to be weird, to follow his habits too closely — he’s just _Brian_. You want him to be just Brian. He _is_ just Brian.

But maybe he doesn’t eat wings anymore. Maybe zombies are all vegetarian for — reasons. Maybe ketchup too closely resembles…

The topic shifts and Brian withdraws, poking at his fries but not eating anything else, his head down. You half-listen to Simone, Jenna, and Clayton talk about something — haunted? Something haunted, but mostly you watch Brian. He’s listening too — he chuckles softly every couple moments, but he’s mostly staring at his plate, at his beer. He wipes condensation off of the glass with his thumb and then drags his thumb across the tabletop. He picks up a fry and then puts it back on the plate. He drinks more beer, and you watch him like — like a fucking creeper, as he sets the glass down and licks his lips, his fingers tapping out a rhythm on the glass.

His nails are bare. They were a soft purple when he was buried (you remember, you remember like it was yesterday), but nail polish doesn’t last a year and a half. It doesn’t hold up after digging your way out of the ground, probably, let alone whatever he did when he was —

And then he’s pushing away from the table, the action sudden and violent in the relative stillness of the group, and he mutters something — an apology, maybe — and rushes towards the restrooms.

Everyone’s quiet, and you catch Simone’s eye. She’s chewing on her lip, and she keeps shifting like she’s considering getting up and following after him. “D’you think…?”

“Maybe it was too much socializing,” Clayton suggests, and you hear murmurs of agreement but nobody looks particularly convinced. Brian would get peopled out, sometimes, he could absolutely get overwhelmed, but he's always been up for you — for the team.

You’ve spent all night watching him, trying to piece him back together in your mind — trying to connect the Brian you remember with the Brian in front of you, and…maybe everyone else has been too. And he’s not fitting, not exactly. Not as much as you want him to.

You stand up and hook a thumb towards the restrooms. “I’m just gonna…”

Simone nods. Everyone at the table glances at each other. Jenna grimaces and passes her glass between her hands before looking up at you. “Should you…should you go alone?”

Of everyone at work, you had the most personal experience with what happened. You actually went out, you saw zombies, even if it was from a distance. Even if they were usually dead as soon as one of the soldiers caught sight of them, as soon as you heard their low grunts. Dead or subdued, once the government decided that's what they should do instead. But even with that, you never felt the danger of it, not like your family up in Maine. You never felt threatened by the zombie uprising.

Sure, you’ve spent the last ten minutes mentally debating whether or not he doesn’t eat wings because they remind him too much of human flesh, but Brian's not… he's _not_ a threat. You don't blame Jenna for considering it, she's just being fucking genre savvy, she definitely has the most knowledge regarding zombie horror tropes. But Brian's just — he's _Brian._ Your lives aren't a horror movie.

“It’s fine, I’ll just see if he’s okay.” You pocket your phone though, just in case. Fuck, just in case. (He's _Brian_.)

The restroom’s silent when you slip inside, and you do a quick check — no one at the urinals, and the handicap stall is open. The other stall door is closed, and the doors stretch all the way to the floor so you can’t check underneath. “Hey, you okay?”

You hear a huff, and then a low groan that reverberates off the tile, reverberates within your chest. You jerk back before you can think the action through, colliding with the wall behind you, and you think about hiding — the handicap stall’s close, but Rhiannon told you about their strength, about seeing them push through steel slat fencing. They don’t move fast though, you have time to get to the door, is there a lock? Does it lock from the outside? Can you barricade —

And then it — _Brian_ coughs, and you hear liquid hitting liquid, and a long sigh. “I’m okay, Pat.”

You’re shaking.

You breathe out slowly, and you swallow. You wait for your heart to stop throwing itself against your ribcage.

Fuck, it’s _Brian_ , and you. As soon as you had the opportunity, you thought he was. And yeah, you’ve seen some fucked up shit (not as bad as others, you had a Goddamn joyride through the apocalypse), and you’ve never — you’ve never been a fan of zombie media — but all day he’s been... maybe not normal, but still himself. Quieter, but himself. Human. He’s been _human_.

You close your eyes. You swallow again. You approach the stall. “Did you, uh, did you eat something...?”

He laughs — a thick, unpleasant sound — and you hear the rustle of clothing. “Yeah. Yeah, I ate something. Shit.”

“Can I —”

“No.” He was never short with you. Even when he'd had a shit day, a shit week, he buttoned up and presented himself with a smile, but now his tone is clipped. Kind of bitchy, actually. “Just give me a minute. Go back to the table.”

You pull out your phone to text Simone:

_> He's fine_

_> Beer didn't agree with him_

The toilet flushes and you step back from the door in time to avoid getting smacked by it. He hesitates when he sees you there, his unblinking eyes locked on you, and you push through a flash of fear into concern and curiosity when you see the smear of black across his cheek. There’s more of it collected at the corner of his mouth, like he was puking up oil. Or old blood.

He brushes past you to the sink and washes his hands, then sticks his mouth under the faucet. He tips his head back to gargle and by the time he's spit and turned, you've collected a handful of paper towels for him and are holding them out like they're an apology for you still being here.

He takes them and turns back to the mirror, and when he wipes the edges of his mouth you see black. You see white.

Black lips. White skin.

His lips are — they’re actually dark purple, like he had hypothermia. (Like he’s dead.) The edges of his mouth are pale, splotchy white intermingled with flesh tones and a few lingering speckles of that black gunk he was puking up. He curses under his breath and rubs more fiercely at the black, and then curses again once he’s gotten it off.

It’s obvious, now that you see it. Of course he was wearing makeup. He’s still cold — it’s not like he has blood pumping through his body. The flourescent lights of the bathroom starkly show that his skin color isn’t exactly right: too orange, too monotone.

You'd read about victims of PDS needing to comply with public decency laws but you'd given up on the legislative jargon before you got to any details that expanded on that.

You pull out your phone again.

> _Can you bring your makeup_

_> Foundation_

_> Concealer?_

_> Whatever you have_

“Fuck,” Brian whispers, and he gets a new sheet of towel, wets it and starts dabbing at his mouth. “ _Fuck,_ ” he says again, louder, and you want to touch him, put your hand on his shoulder but he’s — he’s sharp edges now. It’s stupid when you think it, but it’s what comes to mind. You remember a Brian who put himself through the ringer to be approachable, who was so Goddamn eager for people to like him he showed up to work on his own birthday with donuts.

But in this moment he’s all sharp edges. You don’t know what would happen if you touched him.

You still want to.

“It’s fine, Brian,” you tell him, and he scoffs and leans closer to the mirror. “Really —”

“Oh, is it? Is it _fine?_ Did you know that it’s _illegal_ for me to _not have_ —”

And then someone knocks on the door to the restroom and you open it. Simone looks like the human embodiment of concern. She holds out a compact and doesn’t ask if everything’s okay, doesn’t even try to see Brian around the door. You give her a thin smile, and she nods before leaving you to it.

“What are you —” Brian asks, half-turned away from the mirror. He’s done a decent job of spreading his existing makeup over what he scrubbed off, but when compared to the rest of his face it looks like shit. Like reverse Ronald McDonald.

“Uh, here.” You hold the makeup out to him and he looks at it and then back up at you. “You were gonna say it's illegal to not wear it, right? It's subsection — A dot fuck off.”

He takes the compact and stares down at it for an uncomfortably long amount of time, before rubbing his hand across his eyes. “Weird name.” He looks up at you and — one of his contacts has unsettled. His whole eye is white, the veins running through it black, and when he blinks the contact shifts back into place like he's some sort of second-eyelidded frog. It's unnerving, and at the same time you feel like you've been allowed to see something, even accidentally, that Brian wouldn't want anyone to see. “More people would read legislation if that's how they named things.”

He’s still just looking at you. He draws his lower, dark lip between his teeth. When he releases it there are clear indentations that linger there, and you have to push down the urge to reach out. To run your thumb across them. You’d never done it back when he was — you’d never done it before. You’d wanted to. You want to now. That’s familiar.

“Thanks, Pat Gill,” he says, and he turns back to the mirror, leaving you reeling — you’d forgotten his habit of calling you… How could you have forgotten that?

He fixes his makeup — Simone’s foundation doesn't blend perfectly, but it's close enough — and you startle when the door swings open and some random guy walks in and beelines for a urinal. Brian finishes quickly before the guy can join him at the sinks, and you start to head back and. You stop in the hallway. You feel him brush up against you as he barely stops in time, and when you turn around he's glaring up at you.

The expression is gone off his face as soon as you register it, and he tilts his head. “What's up?”

“Was that because,” you start, and you think of his bitten-off comment, _he ate something_ , yeah, he ate something, “I mean, nobody's gonna mind if you don't eat.”

His tongue darts out of his mouth. He looks past you, over your shoulder. “It's weird.”

You want him to look at you. You feel off-kilter from — God, the adrenaline still working its way out of your system, from the brief glimpse of what Brian looks like now, what he doesn't (isn't _allowed_ to) show anyone. You want him to look at you. “We're just happy you're here, no one's gonna be upset you aren't eating.”

He does look at you then, and his eyes are hard, like he doesn't believe you. Like he maybe thinks you're full of shit. You're still glad he's looking at you. “It's weird,” he repeats, but he doesn't press it, just steps around you.

Neither of you say why Brian left. He passes Simone her compact, thanking her with a small smile. He doesn't eat or drink anything else. You don't think he's supposed to eat or drink anything at all, but you don't know how to confirm that. _Hey, does undeath come with a functional GI tract? If I were a zombie, would I still be lactose intolerant?_

He’s quiet again, that rage you’d seen in the restroom completely absent from the attentive way he listens to Jenna when she mentions wanting to see the new Jordan Peele movie. When Clayton talks about the new Tetris DLC. When Ashley brings up cats again and shows off a photo of Crunchwrap.

You bump his shoulder before you part ways at the subway station, and for a second you think you see something in his eyes, some intermingling of the fear and anger that had so surprised you, before he gives you a smile.

“It’s good to have you back, man,” you tell him, and he laughs and nods before heading to his platform.

It’s good to have him back. It is.

The thing is…fuck.

You’re not sure who it is exactly you have back.

 ==

You’re trying to stop making comparisons.

He's already in the office when you get in, which is normal. He doesn't always greet you with a smile, which isn't. Summer’s going into full swing and he only wears long sleeve shirts or a jacket. He doesn't wear shorts.

There’s no need to onboard him, he knows everyone but Karen and Emily, and so you just start inviting him to pitch meetings. He contributes, but he doesn’t suggest ideas for his own videos.

(You know you’re treating the entire fucking situation like he was just on sabbatical. You don’t know what else to — how else to handle it. You can’t sit down over drinks and pretzels and ask him what he did during the zombie apocalypse, like you did with everyone else when you all came back to work. For one fucking thing, you’re not sure you want to know. For another thing, you don’t want a fucking repeat of happy hour.)

And then, when he finally _is_ involved in a video, he asks Clayton to keep his name off the credits.

Clayton's editing the latest Overboard, and Brian's standing next to Clayton's desk.  You know you're probably not supposed to hear this conversation. Your headphones are on but you're between clips, and Brian's speaking in low tones.

Brian mostly speaks in low tones now.

“You sure?” You can't see Clayton's expression but you can hear the hesitancy in his voice.  Brian firmly refused to play _Journeys in Middle-earth_ with the rest of you earlier, said _the world isn't ready for my deadly charm_ , and asked Clayton to let him share camera duty. During the shoot, he was the epitome of the quiet, consummate professional — and the antithesis of Brian. You caught yourself performing for him, like you used to, like he used to do for you, trying to make each other laugh. This time, he didn't laugh at any of your stupid jokes. You did get a smile out of him once — and when you did, when he smiled at you, it was only a second before he looked spooked and hid back behind the camera. You kept trying though. You felt fucking energized by that smile.

“I didn’t do anything but stand there,” Brian replies breezily, and from the corner of your eye you see him shift between his feet. He still hasn’t said anything about his limp, and as far as you know, no one’s asked. “Let's keep the, uh, air of mystery alive for little longer?”

Clayton hums noncommittally. Brian appears to take it as agreement and returns to his desk, and you’re torn — you want to Slack Clayton, tell him under no circumstances should he leave Brian uncredited. But you can’t make Brian’s decisions for him, even if half of the comments on Simone’s latest upload were people asking about Brian, ignoring the video entirely. They’re fucking hungry for him.

The episode of Overboard goes up without crediting Brian. There are comments right out the gate, people asking about him, people asking if he was the second cameraman because _Pat_ keeps looking to the right even when the shot's angled from the left.

You hadn’t thought it was _that_ obvious.

You spend some time moderating some of the more incendiary comments, but even with those, it’s people wondering — wanting to know about him. If he’s back. If he’s okay.

You know he’s just being prudent. (You taught him that. You taught him to be more guarded, after he was hired. He was never gonna be as tight-lipped as you but you knew he needed to be more circumspect. He got better. He's gotten really good at it.)

Brian clears his throat. “Can you look at something for me?”

It's late, everyone else long since gone home, and the two of you are the last ones in the office. At least that hasn't changed.

Allegra had asked if you'd wanted to head out with her when she left. She hadn't said why, but you can guess that she wasn't sure if you wanted to be left alone with him. She's just looking out for you.

Your email dings, and you open up the file Brian sent. You don't understand what the piece is at first — until you do. Until it slots into place.

Brian's announcement post when he started at Polygon was short and sweet and very focused on Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles. He talked about his other videos, about Julia's article. He had a poll about FFCC because he’s a giant fucking nerd.

You remember this, because after he… _after_ , you read it again. You read it and reread it, and you watched his videos, and you were a pathetic sadsack about fucking all of it. (These are not the words Allegra used when she saw your YouTube history. There'd been a broader focus on maybe talking to someone about it — but then the world had gone to hell, and you didn't have the opportunity to feel shitty anymore whenever someone unfollowed @GillandGilbert.)

You scroll past him making a joke about his three first names and stop on the paragraph where he says he's _back, baby!_ “Did Tara tell you to do this?”

He huffs a laugh, running his hand through his hair. There’s no good way to ask, but you don’t think his hair grows anymore. It used to grow stupidly fast, you remember him complaining about needing to find a good hairdresser — someone who could “keep him in the manner to which he’d grown accustomed”. But now it’s just floppy enough to get in his eyes — and that’s as long as it’s ever going to get. (Does he get split ends? Him and Jenna used to talk about hair care, about different conditioners, about… what do you do if your hair doesn’t grow?) “Not in so many words. But I have to do something, y’know — and this is better than plastering my ugly mug all over a video.”

Your instinctual reaction is to tell him to shut the fuck up. He used to buoy you up when you felt like shit, somehow knew exactly when you needed to hear a kind word, and you never knew how to do the same for him. Your default response to self-disparagement was honed by your childhood, gruff affection from your dad and the military: very _you’re worth too much to treat yourself like crap, so buck up_. “You should — not, God, you’re not ugly, Brian — but you _should_ be in videos again.”

He grimaces, a wince of an expression before his face smoothes out. Before his shoulders slump and then roll back like he’s let out a sigh. (You’ve seen him breathe, but you’ve also seen him _not_ breathe, his body still for hours except for the methodical movement of his fingers over keys.) “It’s not a good idea. It's really, a really bad idea, actually, if you haven’t considered the full ramifications of being a zombie in a public forum.”

 _It seems like a view count goldmine_ is your first thought, because you're an asshole. But no one else is doing it, there aren't any visible victims of PDS in the media, let alone on YouTube. (If Tara told Brian he had to be more visible, you understand. He’s been working, but he’s a video producer. That’s why he’s here.) Your second thought is if Brian doesn't want to be a sideshow, he shouldn't have to be, and it'd be shitty to make him.

But you don't think he would be. Sure, there'd be people who'd be dicks about it, who already have been, but Polygon fans loved Brian. He was your golden boy. And for all the anxiety he'd have about every video before it went up, he loved it. He fucking loved the whole of it, loved coming up with ideas, loved filming. You remember the way his smile would soften at the edges when people responded, when someone told him what he did meant something to them. He loved that. (You loved that.)

But he's hesitant. He's so fucking hesitant about everything, and you don’t know what to do with that. “Do you _want_ to be in videos?”

He stares at you for a long moment, like he's processing the question. Like he didn't expect it. “That's not really…” he says, and then he laughs, short, hard. (He's all sharp edges.) “God, Pat, does that matter?”

Ache blossoms in your chest, because your first thought is _of course it matters_ and your second thought is _why wouldn't it matter?_ and your third thought, like a sledgehammer to your sternum, is _do you even want to be here?_

“Yes,” is what you say, because you can't ask him that, you don't think you want to know. “Brian, man, yeah, this is your job, but you don't need to do something you hate.”

“I don't hate it,” he replies immediately. He's looking at a point just past your shoulder, and you wish you could grab him, make him focus on you again. “ _This_ , this isn't what I hate, it's fine.”

“Is it?” You should let it go, but he's actually talking to you — you're actually _talking_. “And ‘fine’ is a shitty barometer.”

He frowns, and for once he doesn't chase the expression from his face, he lets it stay, lets himself look unhappy instead of blandly interested. “It's my — my only fucking barometer, Pat. It's leaps and bounds better than 'not fine’, than.” His mouth works around words for a second, like he's struggling to figure out what to say, how to say it. “It’s better than ‘these armed guards are here for everyone's protection’, or ‘you better hope your family has the, ha, the resources to pick you up otherwise you're gonna be shipped off to hard labor probably, because who the, uh, the fuck cares about zombies’.”

He's shaking, just a little, like he's cold, and you didn't expect any of what he just said, you're trying to process it, and all you want to do is reach out. Stand up, grab at him, try and — it wouldn't help, you don't see how it would help, but you want to fucking hug him, you have no idea what to say, but you could ground him (ground _yourself_ ), give him something to —

There’s a clunking sound overhead and the lights go out. You feel every muscle in your body lock up. It’s dark, it’s _dark_ , no lights in the office and your heart starts ratcheting up into your throat, _adrenaline_ , you have no control over fucking adrenaline, and when you look at Brian his eyes are wide too, you can see them in the battery-powered glow of his laptop screen, and then you — you push through the panic until you can _think_ , because oh.

Oh, right.

And you wave your arms above your head, like an absolute dumbass. Like a, like — until the lights come back on.

Because the two of you were too still and the lights turned off. They do that, after 6:30.

Brian’s still staring at you when you look back at him. He's still shaking, but as you watch him it changes, shifts into laughter, harsh and thick-sounding.

“It's okay,” he says, and he leans back in his chair, staring up at the ceiling. “No worries about a second apocalypse. Just energy efficiency.”

“The power didn't go out.”

He tips his head down until he can see you. “What?”

You clear your throat, God, this is not the thing to talk about but _armed guards_ and _hard labor_ are jostling around your brain and you can't focus on that right now, you wouldn't be about to move past it — so you can't think about it at all. “When the first, uh, when victims of PDS showed up we still had power. The internet went out though.”

“Oh,” he says.

“It was hard to get ahold of anyone, check if they were okay. It was pretty locked down here, before I started volunteering I only ever saw uh, one zombie, and it was...” God, killed? Murdered? Fuck, was that murder? It was a zombie, it was trying to climb up your fire escape. After you volunteered, the other zombies you saw in passing, the ones the soldiers would pick off easily like they were shooting cans. “It was hairier in rural areas but America's unhealthy obsession with firearms and the bloated military were actually good for something.”

“God bless the USA,” Brian says, and you realize that you're still talking about zombies getting shot. That Brian's making a joke about it. _Fuck_. “I'm glad you had a comfortable apocalypse.”

The worst thing isn’t the sudden shame curdling in your gut. It’s how tired he sounds.

When you all got back to work you talked. You shared stories, told each other what it was like, what weird things happened. Plante regaled you all with florid descriptions of Texan zombie shenanigans, and Colin lamented that the loss of a zombie uprising was really going to affect traffic. None of you got serious about it, but nothing truly shitty happened to any of you. The worst thing _you_ saw was zombies dying, sometimes, and a man who looked enough like Brian that you thought…

You lean forward. “Do _you_ remember any of it?”

He goes very still, holding himself carefully. You can see the tension in the line of his shoulders. He does this, now — you wonder if he learned it dancing, this tight control over his body. You remember it from before but it was always transitional, every muscle coiling before he launched himself into something ridiculous: a half-assed pirouette or a lunge. Now it's like he's tense more often than not. Readied.

He's not meeting your eyes.

“Huh. Did you — did you know, you're the first person to ask me that?” His mouth opens, then closes. He rolls his chair back away from his desk but doesn’t get up. He pushes his glasses up on his nose and breathes out in a rush, almost a laugh. “That’s — wow, that’s a big wow, Pat Gill — Steven didn’t even want to know.” He must see the lack of recognition on your face because he rolls his eyes. “My social worker, an absolute _peach_ of a man, who really just wanted me to shut the fuck up and be a good zomboy.”

You laugh because — well, because _zomboy_ , but also because you experience a strange relief. Because there’s the anger again, and it’s so much fucking better than still, than calm. If Brian’s angry then he’s not quiet. Sad. Resigned.

“Yeah,” he says, and he waves a hand in front of him, the first time you’ve seen him really gesticulate. Shit. “Because most of the time, let me tell you, _let me tell you_ , he had his hand inches from the button that’d call for the guards to ‘subdue me’. Like I was dangerous?” He laughs, and shakes his head. “Which, fair, anyone in that situation would be wondering why the fuck they were trying to help an actual, an actual real-life monster — something your innate sense of self-preservation sets you up to be scared of. Right?”

You were afraid, in the bathroom at that bar. You were afraid when you thought he was… It came on suddenly, didn’t give you time to actually consider anything but your own safety. A lizard brain response to the situation.

And you were afraid for a split second when the lights went out, but not of him, just — generalized fear. Fear of the unknown. Of everything changing again. And that's what the bathroom was, you realize: you didn't know. You had no way of knowing what was going on and for a split second you thought the worst. You’ve never exactly been an optimist.

And now Brian's looking at you like he's waiting for your indictment. Like he's waiting for you to agree with him, with him calling himself a fucking monster. He's braced himself, his hands curled around his chair armrests.

Fuck, you don't think he's a monster.

“You're not.”

He frowns, and you need him to know. He’s not, _God_ , he’s not — and you’re just trying to understand, you just want him to — you want him to be okay. (To not think of himself as a monster, fuck.) And yeah, he’s different now, but he’s not _that_.

“I’m not, God, I’m not scared of you, Brian.”

“Because you’re —” he, fuck, he _snarls_ at you, standing up from his chair and turning, like he’s going to storm off. But he doesn’t. He stands there for a long moment, staring out across the empty desks, his hands clenched at his sides. You hold your breath. You’re not scared of him. You want to touch him, to curl your fingers around one of his wrists, slide your thumb across his palm. He draws his tongue across his lips and looks at you from the corner of his eye. “You have no idea, Pat.”

And — okay, he's right. You don't have any idea, and that's the problem. He won't listen to you, whatever you tell him, because you don't understand. He's a closed fucking book, he's so different now, he's all sharp edges, and you want to understand.

Maybe if you understand you can finally stop missing him.

“Then tell me.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you for reading!! :D let me know if you liked it.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> it LIVES. (ba dum tss.) as highoctane said when i told her this chapter was done: "happy pride, have some gay suffering."
> 
> also a monumental thank you to fiveyearmission, who helped me make this more than melodrama. you're a HERO, doll. thank you so, so much. ♥

Laura administers your neurotriptaline. Her hands shook the first time, but she’d laughed it off, told you she’s never been comfortable with _medical stuff_. She’s steadier now, and it’s just part of your morning routine. You roll out of bed before she has to leave, and she tells you what she dreamed about, or what her plans for the day are, and she asks you if you’ve got anything _fun_ in the pipeline, and you tip your head forward and let her angle the injector into the hole at the base of your neck. All of the catastrophes your anxious brain has formulated bubble up: if the weird black -blood-tinged hole on your neck can get infected with some kind of necrotic superbacteria; or what happens if you miss a dose — how long you’d have before you reverted, before you killed your sister and best friend.

You hug her before she leaves for work. You never used to, you’d yell goodbye at her from the kitchen or from the bathroom if you were even awake in the first place. You hug her now. You want to make sure you’ve hugged her, if anything ever goes… wrong.

You go to work, and you discover exactly how fucking inaccessible New York is. The stairs in your own apartment complex are enough of a struggle, and then the closest station only has stairs because — oh, the station six blocks away has an elevator, so yours doesn’t need one. Cool. Fucking cool, de Blasio. So yeah, you go to work, but you spend most of your commute getting shoved past and sworn at, because you learned quick that New Yorkers ignore everyone unless it’s in their way. You spend most of your commute swearing at your own Goddamned leg anyway, so at least you fit in.

You go to work and you start to help out more behind the scenes. You _have_ to help out more. You don't know what would happen if Vox decided you weren't worth keeping on. Would you have a grace period to find a new job, or would you just be carted off without warning? (You lie in bed one night, unable to sleep, and think about how they probably keep you on for the optics. You're diverse now. You check a helluva box.)

On weekends you don't leave the apartment. You did, once — you were by yourself, Laura with Erik and Jonah buried deep in work, and you got to the end of the block. You got to the end of the block and you waited for the light to change, and when you stepped off the curb a cab hurtled around the corner and missed you by a foot. You collapsed back onto your butt and sat there. You sat there and you felt the panic infect you inch by inch, until you were shaking. Until your body tried to breathe in huge, shaking sobs. Until someone asked you if you were okay, and when they held out a hand to you to help you up and you took it, their expression changed from compassion to... it was blank. They went blank, and they didn't say anything, and the second you got your feet under you, they fled across the street without looking back .

You almost wish they’d yelled at you, said something mean and awful because you can’t get mad at them for — for checking out, for their quiet fear. If they’d been an asshole about it, you’d at least have been able to call them an asshole.

One Monday you wake up and don’t want to get out of bed. Your head is heavy, your arms and legs slow to respond when you try to move. You feel… raw inside, like if you had to have a normal conversation with somebody your skin would peel off and your rotting guts would spill onto the floor. You find your phone. You turn off your alarm. You text Tara that you don’t think you’re going to make it in that day.

You receive her response fifteen minutes later:

_Listen: this is shitty. You don’t get PTO. It’s part of the whole reengagement thing._

_Or WFH for that matter._

_I’m sorry. See you when you get in._

So you drag yourself out of bed.

Laura gives you your neurotriptaline and she tells you about her plans for the day, and you know it's innocuous, you know she's just making small talk, but it all sounds so... it's all so normal. She'll finish giving you the drugs that ensure you don't kill anyone, and then she'll go off and walk down the street without flinching at cars or people walking too close, and she'll pick up the kid she nannies and they'll do whatever it is they do with their day, and eventually the kid will grow up and Laura will find someone new, because normal humans age and normal humans find new jobs, they're not tied to something with the threat of fucking labor camps hanging over their heads if they fuck up —

You're not being fair.

You tell her you love her, and she kisses your temple, and she leaves for her very normal day.

You struggle getting down the stairs in your building, and then down and up the stairs at the station. You get called a bunch of names but it’s happened enough that it’s background noise by now, commuters annoyed at how slow you are, how you’re in their way, and at least you make it this time without tripping over your own feet. (At least you can call _those_ people assholes in your head.) You go into work. There's a donut on your desk next to a post-it from Tara with nothing but her name and a sad face. You stare down at it for — too long, while you debate if it's sweet or if it's funny or if it just pisses you off, that she was misguided enough to think you could eat this to feel better.

Jenna pulls you into working on the script for one of her videos, and Clayton asks for your input on text placement in one of his. It's breadcrumbs, little things you can affect from behind the scenes, but you know Jenna wants to give you more: there's a segment where she needs someone to chime in from off-camera, and she doesn't say she wants you to do it but it's implied. It’s sweet but misguided, like Tara's donut, both well-meaning and fucking useless. She wants you to be involved, wants to give you the opportunity to get out there, and she doesn't realize how much she's asking of you. _Just expose your whole dead ugly self to the world, Brian!_

Or maybe she does know. Maybe she's trying to push you, maybe they're all worried about how little you're contributing, maybe you're not pulling your weight, maybe you're...

You tell Jenna you think Simone would like the bit, and she agrees.

Simone's working from home, but she Slacks you random shit all day, which isn't too different from what she used to do. But she does it like clockwork now, like she's checking up on you. Like she's trying to make you feel included. (She's just — being your friend. She's being your friend and somehow you're turning that into a bad thing.)

Pat doesn't say much besides good morning. He hasn't said much to you since the night at the bar, since your first day back, since you freaked him out. For a second that night, right after you'd come out of the bathroom stall, he'd looked… terrified. You don’t know how you’re supposed to address that, how to fix it, if you even can, because now he’s the only one who doesn’t even seem to be trying to make you feel welcome, pretending nothing’s changed.

It carves into a part of you that you weren’t sure was left, a part you thought had maybe stayed dead. A part of you that remembers the way he’d smile at you when you were alone. Back when your heart rate could pick up, when you fantasized about what would happen if you touched him and he let you.

It was a fantasy then, and now it’s a fucking joke. Because he doesn't say much to you, but he does watch you, closely, all the damn time. It’s like he's trying to find chinks in your human facade. Like he thinks you're on the edge of turning to Jenna when she asks you a question about J-cuts and slamming her head into the carpet-covered concrete so her skull cracks open.

That evening, you get a letter in the mail.

It’s a notification of a scheduled appointment with your new social worker — which is apparently a thing that no one thought you needed to be told. It’s apparently a thing that’s going to happen on a biweekly basis, because of course, right, why did you think you wouldn’t be monitored? Observed? Someone has to get you your neurotriptaline and ask you prying question about how you’re _feeling_. Someone has to review your performance at work, make sure you’re being a good look worker bee.

God, you’re an idiot for not realizing this was going to happen.

You dig up the contract you signed that first day back at work and read it more in depth, just in case. You read it slowly, spending time on the legalese now that you’re not feeling the pressure of the HR woman’s stare, the anxiety of seeing everyone again. You take pictures of certain paragraphs to send to your brother, to ask his advice.

You and he have talked on the phone since you’ve been back, but he hasn’t been able to get away from work and his family. He has a daughter now. He sent you pictures. She’s perfect, hazel eyes and tawny hair and a soft smile. Her name’s Brianna Joan. When he told you that, you had to put your phone down, step away. Hours later, you finally replied, told him it was a pretty name, that Dad would’ve liked it.

Laura slides her arm around your shoulder while you’re stuck on the wording on page 15, something about the difference between unnecessary and necessary precautions, and she leans her head against you and says, “This isn’t fair.” She means the contract, and maybe everything else: the medication, and the rules, and the fact that the first thing you felt when your brother told you he’d named his daughter after you was revulsion. You were horrified that she shared a name with someone — with some _thing_ that…

You hum, because you don’t think you can voice your agreement. You don’t know what you’d say. You’re worried if you opened your mouth and tried to describe it you’d never stop, and she’d learn exactly what you are. What you remember doing.

She wouldn’t put her arm around you then.

On Wednesday morning when you’re in the middle of applying your makeup, your phone pings at you. The top news story of the morning is a “Zombie Attack on Family”. Your first fucking naive thought is how weird it is that there are still free-roaming zombies out there. Then you tap on the article.

A man in Richmond, Virginia reverted this morning. He had a wife and a son. There’s a photo of his family from before he died, then one of him from this morning, and he’s. He’s wearing a muzzle but you can still see the blood streaked across his face, splattered across his shirt. He’s straining against the officers holding him.

You drop your phone when you try to lock it. You leave it on the bathroom tile and finish your makeup. You’re distantly glad you’ve already put your contacts in because your hands are shaking. When you finish you grab your phone and shove it into your pocket without looking at it.

Jonah’s eating breakfast when you leave the bathroom and he greets you warmly, and you — you think you smile at him before you grab your jacket and head out the door.

You don’t really remember getting to the subway. You used to do things on autopilot but it was because you were thinking about work, about the video you were in the middle of editing, about needing to remember to buy cat food, about the way Pat had tossed you a bottle of tea the day before and _smiled_... You’re just moving now, dragging your distant body from point A to point B, and once you’re at point B you stand there and wait for your train and ignore the man glaring at you from down the platform. You can hear him muttering under his breath and it’s — it’s mean of you to dismiss him outright, to assume that he’s just a crazy old guy — but the alternative is so much worse.

He takes a step towards you and points, and you can see now that he’s reasonably dressed, looks like he showered recently, and you’re such an asshole for hoping he’s nuts, but he’s not, is he, he just looks angry, and his voice is getting louder over the sound of the train pulling into the station.

“You _fucking_ monsters,” he shouts, and you turn to the train, the doors aren’t open yet, you’d — you’d really like the doors to open, is this your train? It doesn’t matter, you need to, shit, you need to get away from him, because people are turning towards him and they’re looking at you, and he’s saying, “Are you going to go apeshit, zombie? Crack my head open, you fucking murderer? You’re all _fucking_ murderers,” and the door opens and you rush onto the train, push past the people trying to exit, get called an asshole, worm your way into the corner furthest from the door, and you don’t look back, you can’t look — if he followed you, if he’s still yelling, you don’t know what you’re going to do. No one’s going to step in to defend you. You’re on your own.

You stand in the corner of the car and stare out the window and you wait. You wait. And the train moves and no one’s yelling at you, and the loudspeaker announces this is indeed your train, and you take a deep fucking breath and wish it did anything to calm you down, anything at all.

When you get to work you head straight for the bathroom, look in the mirror. Oh. You just, you just did a shitty job applying your foundation, so anyone could’ve looked at you and known what you are. You can fix that. You _have_ to fix it, and you brought a compact, it’s fine, you can take care of it. It’s fine. It’s an easy fix: slathering your face in beige.

Tara calls you into her office during lunch. She has a Lean Cuisine steaming on her desk, and she gestures to the chair across from her before stabbing a wilting bright green piece of broccoli with her fork. "Hey, so," she says, and you feel yourself tensing, ready for the questions, ready to convince her you love your job, you want to be here, you're doing _fine_. "You need to be more involved. You, in front of the camera or working on scripts, _credited_."

You stare at her, and it takes no time at all for you to imagine the myriad reasons you need to be working better, working _harder_ , if you don’t work harder, then — and she circles her broccoli-laden fork at you. “Don’t. It’s because you’re fucking talented, Brian, not because of any mandated bullshit.”

This... isn’t how you expected this conversation to go. Everything you were frantically planning to say doesn’t apply here, doesn’t apply when she’s _encouraging_ you, not reprimanding. “I’m not sure anyone would want, uh. I’m not sure, people aren’t the biggest fans of...” Fuck, maybe you aren’t doing enough. No one would _want_ a zombie visible, the stupid diversity checkmark aside, and she’s just not saying you’re useless to spare your feelings, which is — distinctly un-Tara behavior, sure, but she’s been coddling you a little bit, since the work from home thing. She keeps buying you pastries. “I know I’m not, uh, pulling my weight, but maybe I can keep, uh, I really enjoy camera work.”

She rolls her eyes, shoving the broccoli into her mouth and grimacing. “I’m being real with you right now: the government wouldn’t care if we slapped you with a broom and bucket and had you muck out the bathrooms. Far as I can gather, they just want you gainfully employed so they can garnish your wages. _I_ want you to make videos, to be in front of the fucking camera, because you’re good at it, and we could use the views.”

You shift in your seat. “So you want…”

“I want to exploit you, yes,” she says, and she gives you a wicked grin that surprises a laugh out of you. “You’re _good_ at what you do, and I want you to do it. Also the fact that you’re a member of the undead is kind of neat.” You laugh again. _Neat_. God. She’s just _saying_ it, and you might be hurt if it weren’t so refreshing. If it weren’t so _Tara_ , treating you like she would have before. “And I want you to have an intro post ready to go up tomorrow morning.”

“An intro post.”

She smiles at you, and even though you’re still not sure what to make of this conversation her expression is fond. She never told you she missed you or that she’s glad you’re back, but she does keep buying you food that you give to Clayton. “You are technically a new hire.”

“A brand new me,” you agree, and she waves you out of her office with her fork.

==

You end up staying at work late. You don’t mean to, but you have a mostly blank Pages document open and it’s _been_ open for the last four hours, and you’ve typed a total of maybe twenty sentences that you’ve since deleted. Your current draft is:

_Hi! My name is Brian David Gilbert and I’m a murderer._

You wrote it as a joke.

That man in the subway called you a murderer, ha ha, and he was right, and now you’re writing about yourself for your video producer job at a media company because your boss wants you to put yourself in front of a camera. As part of your dream job, working with people you respect. A job you did for a while until you got hit by a car and died on an operating table and came back to life and killed and ate people. And now you’re back! Ha ha!

It’s been the only thing in the document for the last hour, and every time you start to backspace you get to _I’m a_ and you stop. Retype it. Delete it again.

You search for your original post, the one you wrote when you were first brought on. You copy the format of it — make a joke about your name, dive into an easy joke about how much you had to go through to get a remake of Crystal Chronicles — and then you’re typing _I’m back, baby!_ like you’d just gone on sabbatical.

You read it over and it reminds you of your copyediting days, when you had to make all those fucking financial gains and losses digestible. It’s forced. It’s _fake_ , and you push back from your desk and glance up at Pat, who’s glaring at his own screen like it personally offended him. Which is better than staring at you like you’re an uncanny valley Brian he’s trying to parse.

Of everyone at the office, even Tara, he’s probably the only one who’d tell you if what you’ve written is as shitty as you think.

You clear your throat. “Can you look at something for me?”

And he reads it over and then he looks at you and he finally talks. He finally fucking _talks_ to you, and he tells you you should be in videos again. He tells you about his easygoing apocalypse. He tells you you’re not a monster, as if he hasn’t been acting like he’s waiting for you to reveal yourself. And then he tells you — he tells you to tell him about what you remember.

His expression is open and aching, vulnerable in a way you rarely got to see, even before. You want to trust that expression but you can’t shake the feeling that he’s info-gathering. That he’s still trying to piece you together, like he doesn’t realize you’re a Goddamn fractured beast and there’s no point.

 _Then tell me_.

Fuck. Tell him. Just tell him — tell him _what_. Tell him about waking up alone in the dark? Tell him about how you felt driven to dig, to claw your way out of the box you were trapped in? Tell him about the only thing in your head once you were out — about the hunger, about the _hunger_ and how good it felt to satiate it?

Or about how simple it was. How you were never sad. How you were never anxious. How when you had your fists shoved in someone’s skull all you felt was satisfaction.

“D’you watch the news?”

“I try not to,” he jokes, and then he closes his eyes and sighs. Looks at you and frowns. “Not really. Why?”

“My phone, uh. It gives me top headlines.” You grab it, find the news article — you’d kept it open. You haven’t unlocked your phone since you read it. “So this morning I was greeted with.” The photo’s not as bad as you remember, now that you’re expecting it. A zombie with a muzzle over its face, its arms bound behind it, being frog-marched into a paddy wagon. You scroll down to the photos of its family: a woman and a child, smiling. “This — _monster_ , it missed a dose. They think it may have, uh, skipped it, intentionally, but they don’t say why. Why it would’ve wanted to. But it.”

You hold your phone out to Pat. His hand’s shaking just a little when he takes it, but you know it’s not personal. He’d be freaked out by any zombie. You’re not special.

You watch him read — watch as whatever color was left in his face drains. He looks so pale in the cheap fluorescent lights. He looks a little like you, before you slather on makeup.

(He’s nothing like you. He’s nothing like who you are — _what_ you are.)

“This was… today?” is all Pat has to say when he passes your phone back to you.

“This morning. They didn’t say, um, how long it took. After its missed dose, before it reverted and ate its entire fucking family.”

“His,” Pat says — no, _corrects_ , and you have to slide your phone into your pocket so you don’t fling it at the glass pane of the window behind Pat. You clench your hands at your sides and when Pat notices and starts looking concerned, you stop. You spread your fingers wide and try to look small. It’s not hard anymore, you’ve spent the last few weeks not wanting to be noticed — really, really not wanting to be noticed — and you’re getting good at it. Round your shoulders. Drop your head just enough that you look sad, not drunk.

He starts to move towards you, his arm reaching out, but he stops. Sways back into his original position.

“Its,” you tell him, insistent. You want him to understand. You look up at him, and whatever he sees on your face makes his fall, leaves him looking stricken, like you’re hurting him by speaking the truth even though he _asked_ you, he wanted to know. “Pat, he stopped being a, a person, he, _it_ wasn’t a person when it crawled out of its grave and killed — when it _killed_ people, and it wasn’t a person when it was caught and injected with drugs that made it more, more person-adjacent. A _person_ doesn’t get told their entire life is dependent on paying back their debt to humanity. A thing isn’t a person when everyone who touches him — _it_ , God, Goddamnit — when everyone recoils like, like they’re shocked, because it feels cold and dead and, and _dead_ , and even the people who loved it back when it was a _him_ are, they’re all trying but it’s so _forced_ —”

“It’s not forced,” he snaps, but he’s staring down the bank of computers when he says it which really… which really dampens the effectiveness of the statement. Which makes the hurt in his voice dagger under your skin — as though he’s telling you you’re wrong. That on top of everything else, you’re wrong about what you’re feeling too.

 _Oh_ , you think, and you feel stupid. Naive. _I’m angry._

You were sad, when you first woke up in the facility. You were scared. You felt alone. But you couldn’t cry and it’s not like anyone wanted to hear you talk about your feelings. Your sadness didn’t mean anything — it definitely didn’t change anything. Your sadness didn’t stop Carlos from being escorted away to work off his cost to the government. Being sad didn’t stop Steven from treating you like you were dangerous. Nobody who recoils from you cares that it makes you sad.

And now your sadness has curdled into anger. You’re angry. You’ve been angry. Every asshole on the subway, every time Laura treats you with kid gloves, every new regulation you didn’t know, every misguided attempt at support you’ve received, every time Pat hasn’t _talked to you_ —

“It feels forced,” you bite out, because there’s acid inside of you, eroding you from the inside out. “It feels — Pat, it's all fucking _awful_."

He looks at you with wide eyes and a frown and for one horrifying moment you think he's going to touch you. You don't want to be touched, he shouldn’t touch you, you don’t want _him_ to touch you, especially not if it's going to be muted and dull and grey and _dead_. Because fucking — contrarily, you suddenly want so badly to be touched but only if you can feel it like you did before, when you could actually feel the push of people in the subway and the easy affection of the people who love you and.

"Do you," Pat says, and he gnaws on his bottom lip and breathes out in a rush, "do you want to be here?"

It feels like a solid hit to your sternum, like you’ve been physically struck. An actual physical reaction — the most you've felt since you woke up in that hospital.

You fish mouth at him for a second, and try to figure out how to respond to that. You try to figure out what your answer even is.

"I don't know," is what you finally manage, and he makes a noise like you punched him in the gut, and he steps towards you.

"Do you mean at work or…" he says, as if work matters compared to — the rest of it. You wake up every morning in time for an injection that keeps you from killing people. You’re not allowed to miss a day of work except to see a, a babysitter who hates you and hates their job and who you’re going to have to play nice with anyway. You struggle through flight after shitty flight of stairs and you struggle to ignore every cold glare sent your way by a stranger and now, now you’re about to tell the world that you're alive again and will have to put every tumultuous emotion you feel aside to entertain them. As if it _matters_.

"Pat," you say, and your voice cracks, "I don't know."

He breathes out through his teeth and pushes his hair out of his face, drags his hand over his mouth. "Shit. Shit, I'm not — I'm not going to, I have no idea what you're going through. But if it, if it means _anything_ , it really, really fucking sucked, you not being here." His voice is thick, and you watch him grimace in profile, watch his expression collapse, and you don't think you could stand it if on top of everything else Pat Gill cried right now.

He looks at you. He’s not crying yet, but his face is red, his eyes wet. You’ve never seen him look like this before. You wonder if he looked like this at your funeral.

He smiles humorlessly. “I’m glad you’re here. I — missed you.”

It looks like it pains him to say. Which is just, that’s just Pat, compliments dressed up in sarcasm and teasing until he has to be earnest and then he’s awkward as hell about it. You remember that. You remember his stilted sincerity when he’d tell you how proud he was of something, of…

"Okay," you say. That's — a bad answer, but you don't know what else to say. You can’t tell him you missed him because you didn’t. You didn’t think about him when you were a monster killing people, and once you were being treated you had bigger things to focus on than your stupid crush, and now you’re here and you don’t know if you’re even capable of any emotion but this surging, unfocused anger about how much you’ve lost: who you were before, what you could have been, your — potential. That long road of forking possibilities.

He says he missed you. That he missed… “You miss Brian,” you say, and it sounds stupid as you say it but also feels like the truest thing you’ve said all day.

“I, yeah, I missed you,” he repeats, clearly trying to work through your weird response, and you shake your head.

“No. No, you miss — you miss Brian, you still do.” A weight is lifting from your shoulders even while your throat feels like it’s closing up. “Because I do, I do too. I miss Brian.”

He’s frowning at you, and he opens his mouth a couple times. “Brian, man, you’re not, uh, you’re not making a lot of sense.” He looks wigged out, but there’s something else to his expression and you can — you _know_ him, still, all of his microexpressions. You spent so much time trying to classify all of them so you could predict what he’d need from you, what he wanted, what you could do to make him like you. You’re fully conversant in Pat Gill and he looks. Guilty.

“I am. I am and you know it, you know I’m not. I’m not _him_. I’m this, this new thing —”

“You’re _you_ ,” he interrupts and he takes another step towards you. He looks angrier now, but it’s still there: the guilt. “You’re you, what the fuck are you talking about?”

“I’m not, I’m _really_ not, and you don’t think so either because you’ve been treating me like you don’t know who I am. You’ve been — you barely talk to me! You barely.” Your voice cracks and you huff out a bitter laugh, gesture to yourself. His eyes are wide, his mouth set in a firm line. He’s holding himself like he’s expecting you to throw a punch, which — _God_ , he’s such a liar. You’re not a monster, he says, but he’s still afraid of you. Can’t hide that, can he. “And I get it, I’m, I’m _this_ , I’m, I’m literally one missed injection away from killing people and eating them and becoming a statistic like that guy and I get it, I wouldn’t want to, I wouldn’t want to be friends with me either, but —”

“I mourned you,” he says, and you stop, your building anger faltering. He still looks on the edge of something, but his forehead crumples again like he’s about to cry. No one’s told you about… no one wants to talk about it. Which was fine at first — you’d never fantasized about knowing who’d attend your funeral if you suddenly died. But it quickly became obvious they were avoiding telling you, trying to shelter you from their pain, like you’d be hurt to know they’d missed you. Like that was a bad thing to share. Maybe they just wanted to pretend like nothing had changed, like you hadn’t changed.

Pat’s throat clicks as he swallows. “Grief’s a, a real motherfucker and it never got easier, and then one day we all — fuck, Brian, we got an email from HR and three days later you were alive and _here_ , and I don’t know how I’m supposed to, how I cope with that without making you feel like shit.”

“Well, you’re not doing a great job of it,” you spit out, clinging to your anger, because what’s left of you if it’s gone? A great yawning hole of hopelessness and guilt, and you know that’s what you deserve after what you’ve done but you hate it, you don’t want to drown in it anymore — but Pat’s face is twisted up in grief and God, you’re angry that you’re not really all that angry anymore. “I know I’m not him, Pat. I’m _this_ , but everyone else is treating me like him and you don’t and I just want to know _why_.”

He doesn’t say anything. He opens his mouth and then closes it, dragging his teeth over his lower lip. He’s just _looking_ at you, his expression this nauseating mixture of guilt and sadness and the same kind of hopelessness that’s starting to seep into you again, making you feel small.

You have to say something. The alternative is sitting in this moment and just getting everything you feel reflected back at you but _worse_ , because it’s Pat, because you’ve made Pat feel shitty. “I could try, I could try to act like him but how do I do that?”

“You don’t sing anymore,” he says, and there’s a twist to his mouth like he’s trying to be funny but doesn’t think it’s a good joke.

You laugh, sort of. “At least I can probably physically still do that, right, I can work on that. Brian David Gilbert: chanteur. Having a sense of touch: middling at best. Moving faster than a mile an hour: doubtful. Singing: maybe?”

He shakes his head. “No, don’t, you don’t have to — yeah, you’re different but you’re also the same, and you used to do all these things that made you happy and that’s what I’ve been trying to figure out. I see these brief glimpses but they’re buried under all the bullshit you’ve been dealt, and you’re acting like, like it’s your fault. Like you’re the source. Like you’re the bullshit.”

That’s a hell of a way to explain things.

It resonates in a way Pat probably wouldn’t like.

You wave your hands in front of you, your left arm not managing quite so wide a sweep. “That’s — and what does that mean! I _am_ the bullshit, Pat! Today some guy got mad at me because I did my makeup wrong and he saw what I am and that’s because of me, that’s because of _me_ , it’s not some fucked up social paradigm trying to keep me down, it’s because _I am the bullshit_. ” You pull your sleeve down over your hand and rub at your cheek, rough, until you can see your foundation coming off. “See? Look, you — I _scared_ you at the bar, I know I did, you looked like you’d shit yourself and that.” It hurts. “That’s fine, it’s understandable, okay? Because everyone keeps pretending nothing’s changed but I have. I’ve —” Say it, you coward. “I killed people, and I _enjoyed_ it.”

Pat seems unswayed by your admission which is just — incredible, fucking incredible, and he moves closer to you. His eyes are trained to the patch of skin on your cheek and he doesn’t look disgusted, he looks... He’s looking at you like he wants to touch that patch of skin, like how he looked at you at the bar, when he saw your mouth, when he wasn’t scared anymore. You’re knocked off-center by it — by the familiarity of this gaze. It’s how he looked when you’d do something that impressed him. Before. “None of what happened is your fault. You don’t deserve to be treated like shit.”

“Pat —”

“It’s wrong, this whole set-up is really fucking wrong, Brian, how you’ve gotta work and you don’t get a choice, like you’re some kind of indentured servant.”

He’s closer and he’s still staring at your face.

“They’re punishing you for something that isn’t your fucking fault, Brian. Don’t punish yourself too.”

Then he’s reaching forward, hesitant, his hand stuttering half a foot from you. Your feet are rooted to the floor. You feel caught, held by the potential of his touch, before he closes the gap. He touches your face, his hand on your jaw, his thumb — you can just barely feel it — smoothing over the patch of skin you scrubbed bare.

You make a noise, this punched out from your gut noise. You shudder, whatever last vestiges of humanity you have left setting you shaking because he’s touching you, touching you _gently_ , kinder than something like you deserves. Your anger’s bitter on the back of your tongue, nowhere for it to go now except out, at him, for finally looking at you like you’re no different than you were before, for touching you like you’re not cold and dead.

Except he’s touching you like you’re something dear and he’s looking at you like he only ever did when he thought you were too tired to notice… and he needs to stop deluding himself about what you are. You should push away from him. You should — yell at him, tell him to fuck off, to watch where he puts his fingers, your teeth are surprisingly sharp.

But you don’t.

And he says, “I’m sorry,” his voice thick and scratchy. “I’m sorry for being an asshole since you got back. I’m sorry you have to deal with all this bullshit that isn’t you, I can’t fucking — I can’t overstate that.” He’s not crying but he may as well be. You can’t find the anger but you wish you could because it’d be better than this, than Pat looking at you like you’ve carved out a piece of him and he’s just realizing now how much he misses it. “And I’m really fucking sorry I’m glad you’re here because it’s selfish, when you hate it.”

You can’t find the anger — you should, you _should_ , what a monumentally shitty thing to say, you can picture your response, _go fuck yourself_ , but you can’t force it out. Your mouth won’t form the sounds. His other hand is on your face now and he’s, God, he’s cradling you, and you’re having trouble concentrating beyond that muted sensation.

He whispers, “I didn’t think I’d get to have you again,” and you close your eyes against his tenderness. It’s misguided. You don’t deserve it. You’re going around in circles in your head and Pat’s still touching you like you’re not repulsive, some monstrous knock-off. Like it’s enough that you’re here, no matter how broken you are.

“I don’t know how to want to be here.” You force the words out, make yourself say them even if it feels like you’re throwing his — what he’s told you back in his face, and his hands drop from your face and he’s wrapping his arms around you, and you grab at the front of his shirt and press your face against his neck. It’s an admission you haven’t let yourself make: that you’re not grateful. That you’re not interested in making reparations for the harm you caused. That you’re here because the alternative is worse but for no other reason.

“That’s okay. It’s okay, man, we can — fuck, I don’t know, but you’ve got an entire fucking crew of people who’d go to the mat for you. You’ve got, uh. Me.”

His shirt’s getting foundation on it. Maybe his neck is too, where you’re touching him. You feel light pressure on the back of your neck and you realize he’s moved his hand there — high enough he won't feel the hole, where you get your injections. He’ll get makeup under his nails, moving them slowly over your skin like that. It’s a bad idea.

The anger is still there, simmering in the pit of your gut, but it’s commingling with something else, an emotion you haven’t felt in years. Not since the last time he looked at you with what you thought was intent. Before… You’re not him anymore. Brian’s dead. You’re not Brian.

But Pat never did this with Brian. Never touched him like he’s touching you.

Exhaustion hits you in a rush. You want to go home, lay flat across your bed and stare up at your ceiling. You want time to process. Fuck.

“Write my intro post for me,” you say, and he laughs, shaking against you. “I’m not kidding, you think I’m kidding.”

His head tips forward, touches yours. You think he presses his cheek to your temple. He shouldn’t touch you like this. You’re not going to tell him to stop. “I, Brian David Gilbert, am back at it again at Krispy Kreme.”

Your fingers tighten in his shirt. "That's better than what I have now.”

==

He helps you write your intro post. There aren’t as many memes as he’d alluded to, which you tell him is a shame. He says there's still time to unleash them on your fans in the future, and then argues with you over said fans' existence. It’s fun, actually. It’s kind of fun to argue about something that doesn’t matter.

You leave the office at 9, his shoulder knocking into yours as you walk to the elevator. He keeps pace with you, holds doors open, walks slowly down the stairs by your side at the station. It’s mortifying, his attentiveness, at the same time that it’s kind of… _nice_ to hear him grumble, “Who needs accessibility options in New York,” under his breath. For the first time, you’re not alone in your frustration.

He waits with you on the platform for your train and mutters an excuse about how long he has before his own train arrives on the other side of the station. He's staring across the tracks, resolute, and you have the feeling he wouldn't go even if you told him to. You shouldn't have told him about the jerk this morning.

(If you shuffle between your feet your shoulders, your arms touch. You're glad you told him about the jerk.)

Your train pulls onto the station and lurches to a halt, and you turn to him, give him a half-smile that, for once, isn’t forced. "See you tomorrow."

The train doors slide open. He looks between you and the train, and then he sways towards you, glancing at your mouth and you — you step towards the doors.

“My train’s, uh."

"Yeah, yeah," he says, and he looks like he's shaking himself out of a stupor, and something sparks at the base of your spine, spreads out under your skin. "Have a good night, Brian."

You nod at him stupidly and take another step, onto the car. It’s pretty empty at this time of night, so you can stand at the doors and hold his gaze, lift your hand in an awkward wave. “Bye. Thanks, uh, for tonight.”

He waves back at you as the doors close and he stays on your platform until you can’t see him anymore, and you feel the continuous steady build of something that isn’t despair for the first time since you were alive.

==

Your new social worker’s name is Marjorie Vickers and she looks younger than you, her blonde hair tied back in a strict ponytail and the clasp on her cross necklace rotated around to sit at her collarbone.

If you see her for long enough, she’ll be older than you.

“Tell me how you’ve been,” she prompts, pen poised above her spiral notebook. She looks eager. She’s sitting on a chair, not behind a desk, and you realize that means she doesn’t have an immediate way to call for help if you’re a danger. There’s no button she can push to summon guards. It’s a set-up not unlike your last therapist’s office.

“Fine.” You shrug one shoulder when you say it, and she writes far more than the word _fine_ in her notebook. She watches you as she writes. She doesn’t say anything else. It’s a trick — you’ve been in therapy enough to know that sometimes therapists don’t say anything, to try and get you to fill the awkward silence with more of your feelings.

She should realize you’re good with silence. You spent almost 2 years completely silent.

And she’s — silent back. Because she went to school for this. She’s being paid to make you talk. God, maybe if you talk you can leave sooner.

“Work’s good.” You didn’t read the comments on your intro post but Simone told you people were “fucking jazzed”. You’re working with Clayton on the next Overboard, and your name’s going in the credits. “My coworkers are good.” Pat’s talking to you. He’s still watching you but it’s with intent. You think it’s with intent. “My roommates are good.” Jonah asked you if he could learn how to help out with your neurotriptaline. Laura showed him this morning.

She hums and taps her pen against her notebook. “And you? How’re you?”

“I’m,” you say, and you think about what you could say that would make her nervous. What you could say that would probably get you reported, get you carted off, maybe. And then you think about the anger inside of you, and how it’s no less present but how you’ve identified it, you’ve _expressed_ it, and how that makes you feel. How you feel… “I’m better.”


End file.
